Coming up next at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park is Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers. Suh is one of the most produced playwrights in America today. In 2023, the Playhouse staged Suh’s The Chinese Lady, about Afong May, the first Chinese woman who entered America and was toured around as an attraction across the United States in the 19th century. The tour stopped for several days in Cincinnati in 1834. Like The Chinese Lady, The Heart Sellers, a heartfelt comedy, explores being a “stranger in a strange land.” It’s been one of the most produced plays in the U.S. since its debut in Milwaukee in early 2023. Ten theaters staged it a year ago, and eight more are offering it during the current season.
The Heart Sellers is about a pair of 20-something Asian women in an unnamed midwestern U.S. city in 1973. Brought to America by their med student husbands, they are more or less set adrift. Jane from South Korea is reserved and has a limited command of English; Luna from the Philippines is a chatterbox, given to oversharing. They meet on Thanksgiving Day in a K-Mart and bond during a lonely celebration as they struggle to make a traditional American meal in Luna’s apartment. Fueled by wine, they talk about their isolation, their hopes and the families they yearn for. They fear their heritage will be diluted or forgotten altogether by future generations.
The play’s title is derived from U.S. legislation passed in 1965. Luna explains, “My sister says they call it the Hart-Celler Act because somebody whose name is Hart and somebody whose name is Celler, they wrote this thing and it got made into law and stuff just a few years ago, and I guess before it happened hardly nobody could come from Philippines or from Korea or no place where there’s people like, you know, like us?” Luna and Jane recognize that their journey to a foreign land could mean they’ve sold their hearts for new lives and drifted away from beloved traditions.
The Hart-Celler Act, or the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, as it was formally known, was signed into law by former President Lyndon B. Johnson. The act reformed the nation’s immigration system, doing away with a discriminatory quota system that had favored people from Northern and Western Europe and limited immigration by many from other countries. Its legal framework prioritized highly skilled immigrants, such as Jane and Luna’s med student husbands. In 1960, 84 percent of immigrants to the U.S. were from Europe or Canada. Immigration grew by nearly a half million people annually post-1965, and the law eliminated “national origins” quotas and shifted the balance of immigrants to Latin America, Africa and Asia.
May Adrales, who staged the play’s first production in Milwaukee, said in a program note there: “The Heart Sellers speaks specifically about a Korean woman and a Filipina woman, but it’s a universal story about what it means to migrate when that may or may not have been your choice and to be thrust into a set of cultural norms and a language that you don’t quite understand.” She added, “This play reveals what it means to be isolated and try to find a community when there’s seemingly nobody who can understand your experience. … Anyone who has transplanted from one culture to another or has faced a loss of identity and started anew will relate to the experiences of these characters. My great hope is that audiences come away with radical compassion, that they see the humanity within another person whom they didn’t think they had anything in common with.”
Desdemona Chiang is staging The Heart Sellers for the second time at the Playhouse. (She directed it over the summer for the Virginia Theatre Festival). Her first name, Desdemona (the tragic wife in Shakespeare’s Othello), surely set her up for a career in theater, including several years with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. But her horizons expanded well beyond that. Of Taiwanese descent, she immigrated with her family to America when she was 3 years old. In college at UC-Berkeley, she was pre-med, but a basic acting class drew her to theater and a double degree in that discipline and biology. These days, she dissects and stages plays across the U.S. that resonate with her heritage.
The show’s cast will be two actors new to Cincinnati audiences. Bridget Kim graduated from the University of Louisville and earned her master’s degree at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Over the summer, she played Jane in Chiang’s Virginia production of The Heart Sellers. She’ll repeat that role at the Playhouse opposite Angeleia Ordoñez, a graduate of the University of Michigan, as Luna.
Suh is a little surprised at the geographical spread of The Heart Sellers, from the West Coast to Austin and Atlanta, as well as Chiang’s Virginia Theatre Festival staging. The playwright told an interviewer for American Theatre magazine, “The totality of it — to see it means this much to a much wider audience than I imagined — is so meaningful.” The Playhouse production is Cincinnati’s chance to join that audience.
The Heart Sellers, presented by the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park on its Rosenthal Shelterhouse Stage in Mt. Adams, opens on Oct. 30 and continues through Nov. 23. For more information, visit cincyplay.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Oct. 29 print edition.
This article appears in Oct. 29-Nov. 11.