64 THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020
Celine Song’s play is really two works spliced roughly together.
THETHEATRE
DEEP DIVE
“Endlings” questions the legitimacy of storytelling onstage.BY ALEXANDRASCHWARTZ
ILLUSTRATION BY NADIA HAFID
T
he theatre is full of interruption these
days. The lights go down, the play
begins, and then, suddenly, stops. Some
other action takes over, which, more often
than not, critiques what we’ve just watched
and—rubes that we are—maybe even
enjoyed. The effect, sometimes pro-
foundly, productively destabilizing, can
also be glibly “gotcha,” as the audience
finds itself mocked for its willingness to
suspend disbelief. But lately I’ve heard a
note of anxiety sounding beneath all the
restless form-shifting, one that suggests
playwrights’ ambivalence about the idea
of “storytelling”—that poor, overworked
word, corporately co-opted to within
an inch of its life. Is it all right to make
things up? the playwrights seem to be
asking. Is it ethical? Is it interesting? And
who am I to be doing it?
“Endlings,” Celine Song’s latest play,
is really two works spliced roughly to-
gether: a traditional play that seeks to
depict people’s lives, and a metafictional
examination of the playwright’s own mo-
tivations, which flirts with honesty be-
fore traipsing down a solipsistic path of
no return. (The play, directed by Sammi
Cannold, opened at New York Theatre
Workshop on March 9th; last week, the
theatre, like others around New York, an-
nounced that it is suspending its pro-
gramming for the next month, in re-
sponse to covid-19.) The action beginson the beach of Korea’s Man-Jae island.
Standing before a landscape as stark as
a child’s drawing—blue sea, black rocks,
pale sand—are three old women in or-
ange wetsuits. They are haenyeo: female
Korean divers who swim to the ocean
floor, without the luxury of oxygen tanks,
to gather seafood to sell. They dive every
day, no matter the weather, and their work
lasts a lifetime. Han Sol (Wai Ching Ho),
a sanguine, grandmotherly woman whose
great pleasure is watching television, is
in her nineties; Go Min (the wonderful
Emily Kuroda), salty-mouthed and tough,
is in her eighties; Sook Ja ( Jo Yang), the
glamorous one—she likes to apply lip-
stick before a dive—is the seventysome-
thing baby. Like a doomed trio of Beck-
ett characters, they are alone on the beach,
waiting—for a fisherman, whom we never
see, to come and take their harvest to the
mainland, and also, ultimately, for death.
Song’s conceit is that the three women
are the last of their kind; their profession
will die when they do. “When they were
young they would ask me to teach them
how to dive into the ocean with a rusty
knife,” Go Min says, of her children, who
left the island long ago. “And I would
smack them on the head.”
As the haenyeo go about their busi-
ness (the Basil Twist-like set, in which
hidden windows open to reveal the women
flippering around in a surrealist aquar-
ium populated with puppets of clams and
one very large turtle, is by Jason Sher-
wood), a bright female voice comes over
the speaker system. She sounds like an
announcer on some Discovery Channel
reality show, overlaying the action with
a string of diving factoids and cheesy bi-
ographical tidbits. Is this a dig at the way
Han Sol’s beloved television packages the
mysterious world for facile consumption?
The haenyeo, who can hear the announcer,
seem to be participating, grudgingly or
not, in her commodification of their lives,
though to what end it’s hard to say.
Soon we meet the woman behind the
voice: Ha Young ( Jiehae Park), a stand-in
for the playwright, who is identified in
the script as a “Korean-Canadian Man-
hattanite in her late 20s.” Speaking breath-
lessly, like someone on a coke spree or in
the middle of a panic attack, she tells us
the “story of my immigration,” beginning
with her grandmother’s escape from
northern Korea, in the forties, and con-
tinuing to her mother’s journey, with her,