2020-03-23_The_New_Yorker

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 65

to the West, some fifty years later. Ha
Young seems personally aggrieved about
the crimes that history has committed
against her family, but she also uses irony
to distance herself from strong feeling
even as she confides in us. “Wasn’t that
so cool?” she says, after playing a clip of
real haenyeo singing a haunting song
about a magical island where their dead
husbands wait for them. “Aren’t you ex-
cited to tell your friends? How you saw
a weird play about weird old diving
women from Korea?”
What’s behind that accusatory sar-
casm? After a brief return to the plot of
the play—disaster befalls Sook Ja, plung-
ing Han Sol and Go Min into mourn-
ful melancholy—we find out. Stagehands
whisk away the lovely seaside set, leaving
us in a drab Manhattan apartment with
Ha Young and a man (Miles G. Jackson),
who wears a placard identifying him as
her “WHITE HUSBAND (also a play-
wright).” She’s just shown him the script
for the play that we’ve been watching,
and although he’s blandly encouraging,
he doesn’t seem to like it much. Ha Young
wants him to be jealous, because isn’t your
partner’s creative envy confirmation that
you’ve made something truly worthwhile?
(No, but this sophomoric marriage isn’t
a subject the play is interested in explor-
ing.) “Me being jealous of this play would
mean being jealous of who you are, which
I’m not,” White Husband tells her. He’s
getting at something real, and in a rush
Ha Young tells him what it is:

I decided to write this play because I was
trapped
I first told some white people about haenyeos
and how amazing they are
And then they were like “oh my god that’s
amazing you have to write a play about them”
And I was like “you think?”
And they were like “yes definitely you
should definitely write it”
And I was like “maybe I will”
And some of them even supported me writ-
ing it by giving me free food and vacation
Some of them gave me money so that I
could keep working on it
Some of them just leaned in
Looked at me lustfully
Looked at me hungrily
And said “tell me more about these women”

The appearance of White Husband,
a stale joke in place of a character, had
depressed me, but this monologue (it’s
spoken fluidly, despite being versified on
the page) made me sit up again. Was

Song prepared to call bullshit on the

well-meaning liberal captains of the the-

atre industry, who have, in recent years,

tried to make up for the relative homo-

geneity of their programming by fetish-

istically encouraging young artists to ex-

ploit their “exotic” identities for the

gratification of a sympathetic but per-

sistently white audience? “I just wanted

to tell the story of remarkable Asian lives,”

Ha Young says, but White Husband

knows better: this is marketing speak,

not the way an artist truly thinks.

The moment feels exciting and a lit-

tle dangerous, as when anyone tells a dis-

comfiting truth. But “Endlings” soon

cracks under a crisis of confidence. By

telling us that she was “bribed by white

people’s attention” to write about the

haenyeo, Ha Young effectively labels the

promising play we’ve been watching as

the work of an identity-peddling sellout.

But, instead of showing us what she’d

rather write, she lampoons the kind of

play she presumes we’d rather see. What

follows is a fatally broad, passé pastiche

of the theatre as a place for white men

to cry about their problems: a group of

white male actors (Matt DaSilva, Mark

Mauriello, Keith Michael Pinault, and

Andy Talen) mime a performance of a

“white play” at a “white theatre,” saying

things like “Oh my white god hear my

white prayer.” These lines get easy laughs,

but I doubt even Song believes them.

Earlier, Ha Young said that when she

was in graduate school she made a photo

collage of her writer heroes: “I called it

my ‘wall of boyfriends’ and every single

person on it was a white man.” Park de-

livers the line pointedly, but it turns out

that Ha Young’s heroes were Samuel

Beckett, Edward Albee, and Shake-

speare—white men, all, but hardly ones

who used the theatre to generically flat-

ter their own narrow egos. (And why not

explore the absence of women and play-

wrights of color from her crush list?)

It’s strange to critique a white-male-

centric point of view by pushing women

off the stage; when the haenyeo finally

return, for a coda of sorts, it does little

to make up for the fact that their story

has been sacrificed for a sermon. The

uncomfortable impression is of a fail-

ure of imagination on Song’s part, a de-

sire to blame the audience for not want-

ing to hear what she herself doesn’t yet

know how to say. 

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