The Heart Sellers: An Intimate Portrayal of the Immigrant Experience at the Guthrie
The Heart Sellers lovingly captures the immigrant experience through two absolutely captivating performances by Jenna Agbayani and Juyeon Song. Set in a small New Jersey apartment in the mid-1970s, The Heart Sellers tells the story of two young women settling into their new lives far from family and friends, desperately searching for connection and a sense of belonging in a new country. Talkative Luna is from the Philippines; shy Jane is from South Korea–both are here because their doctor husbands have started the first year of residency in a nearby hospital. Over the course of a single night, they open up to each other about their families, their marriages, their hopes, their fears, their dreams. Every moment between these masterful actors feels authentic: the characters feel raw, lived in, fully formed. Their dialogue and body language conveys a massive range of emotion, not just in the delivery of their lines, but in the awkward pauses and stilted laughs of people struggling to carry on a conversation with a total stranger. Each character’s willingness to open up and be vulnerable to the other makes their ensuing friendship all the more believable, so much so that, by the time they physically shed their American outfits in exchange for Luna’s “home clothes,” you can tell these women have formed a rare, unshakeable bond.
As a second generation Chinese immigrant, this play spoke to me in a way that I have rarely experienced at the theater before. My father came to the United States, most likely thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (aka, the “Hart-Celler Act”). I had only a vague idea that there had been a change to U.S. immigration policy in the late 1960s and 1970s, but The Heart Sellers covers this bit of exposition in a way that feels fluid and natural. Following more than a century of enforced anti-Asian discrimination through things like the Chinese Exclusion Act, and internment of Japanese Americans during the 1940s, suddenly the U.S. allowed a massive wave of highly educated new immigrants, many of them from previously excluded Asian nations like China, Japan, the Philippines, and other war-torn countries like Laos, Vietnam, and Korea. The result would be a wave of doctors, engineers, scientits, and other academics and the stereotypes to match. You can trace the origins of many Asian tropes to these immigrants who arrived and spread out across the country in search of work, only to find that the customs and mannerisms from their home cultures stood out in unpleasant ways.
But all of that is barely on the horizon for Jane and Luna. For her part, Luna talks about the future she imagines and the one that is most likely to happen. She’ll start a family and raise the children while her husband works long hours at the hospital; if all goes well, the children will have a more comfortable life than she did growing up. As the new generation assimilates to life in America, they’ll grow up in an entirely different world and she’ll barely understand them. It’s a vision of both great success and profound loss at the same time that immigrant families know all too well, regardless of where they come from. I was eager to bring my daughter to this show, and it was rewarding to see how much she liked seeing this side of our family’s history on stage. It’s our story as much as it is their story.
A tight 90 minutes with no intermission, The Heart Sellers is funny, poignant, profound, and fast-moving. Tickets start at $37.
Photo by Dan Norman
