‘The Coronary heart Sellers’ evaluate: The loneliness of immigrants

The difficulty of immigration has been entrance and heart on our levels this fall. Playwrights are responding to not the headlines (drama performs the lengthy sport) however to the human toll of entrenched prejudices and legislative negligence which have turned American politics right into a blood sport.

Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding,” which ends its run on the Mark Taper Discussion board on Sunday, and Rudi Goblen’s “littleboy/littleman,” which had its world premiere on the Geffen Playhouse final month, deliver us nearer to characters who got here to the U.S. for alternative and discover themselves trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare that has relegated them to the shadows of their adopted homeland.

Including to this checklist of immigrant-themed work this season is Lloyd Suh’s “The Coronary heart Sellers,” which opened final weekend at South Coast Repertory. The manufacturing is directed by Jennifer Chang, who staged the play’s world premiere at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in 2023 with the identical two-person forged.

Nicole Javier and Narea Kang reprise their roles in a drama that, like Suh’s “The Far Nation” (a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2023), views the hot-button subject of immigration by the lens of historical past. The play, set in 1973 in an unnamed midsize American metropolis, revolves round two ladies, one from the Philippines, the opposite from South Korea, who’re a part of the wave of Asian immigration that was made attainable by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, colloquially referred to as Hart-Celler after Sen. Philip Hart and Rep. Emanuel Celler who co-sponsored the invoice.

A useful program observe by dramaturg Adrian Trujillo Centeno explains that the regulation eradicated “the nationwide origins quota system that had favored Northern and Western Europeans because the Nineteen Twenties.” However President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the laws, didn’t foresee how “this well-intentioned reform would set off one of the dramatic demographic transformations in American historical past whereas concurrently facilitating new types of discrimination that persist immediately.”

The brand new immigration standards got down to be extra impartial (household reunification {and professional} abilities), however enhancements in a single space led to difficulties in one other. Human beings are infinitely extra varied than administrative classes.

Luna (Javier) and Jane (Kang) are each married to males who’re medical residents on the identical hospital. However their dependent standing prohibits their employment, casting them into the murky position of supportive but alienated spouses who’ve needed to relinquish greater than their full international names.

Set on Thanksgiving evening, “The Coronary heart Sellers” can’t disguise its synthetic setup. Luna has invited Jane again to her condominium after working into her on the grocery store whereas whimsically choosing up a frozen turkey she hasn’t a clue easy methods to prepare dinner. The 2 ladies — full strangers, for all intents and functions — are jittery round one another till they uncover how a lot they’ve in widespread.

Each their husbands work at evening, leaving them alone to brood on all they’ve left behind. Loneliness is endemic to their lives, and Luna, an ebullient character, appears to be affected by acute cabin fever.

She’s so desirous to make a pal that she acts fully “goofy,” as she herself ultimately acknowledges. Jane, whose timidity is obvious in the best way she solely reluctantly takes off her winter coat, behaves as if she’s been kidnapped by a very solicitous kidnapper.

Suh’s mission right here is just like that of Bioh’s and Goblen’s of their respective performs: to humanize characters whose lives have been cruelly politicized. The issue with “The Coronary heart Sellers” is that Luna and Jane are saddled with a contrived premise that doesn’t enable them enough room for dramatic complexity.

They eat processed snacks, open a bottle of wine and put together the turkey with paltry components and Jane’s Julia Little one ingenuity. As they develop extra comfy in one another’s firm, they share tales of their earlier lives and the emotional sacrifices they’ve needed to conceal. (The title ideas off the Faustian discount that immigration entails.)

One other bottle of wine and the ladies fully let their hair down. Having been pent up for thus lengthy, friendless and homesick, they go wild within the security of Luna’s generic condominium, which scenic designer Tanya Orellana furnishes with makeshift graduate faculty touches. A carton serves as an finish desk and a garden chair makes no apologies for itself within the dwelling space. This house is clearly a pit cease.

The ladies dream up dissolute eventualities for themselves as they dance themselves right into a frenzy and drop their facades. It turns on the market’s fairly a little bit of disappointment behind Luna’s bubbliness and a great deal of metal beneath Jane’s docile demeanor.

However Suh depends on comedian stereotypes to maintain dramatic momentum. The shortage of consequential motion forces the playwright’s hand, and the characters go away a strained impression that’s exacerbated by the performers.

“The Far Nation,” by which Suh examines the tough realities of Chinese language immigrants in San Francisco through the Chinese language Exclusion Act period, is a much more sophisticated piece, elevating questions on ethical motion in an immoral system. “The Coronary heart Sellers” embodies historic materials that’s each bit as important, however the play’s slender scope diminishes the impression of this candy but theatrically unconvincing Thanksgiving go to.