It’s Thanksgiving, and Luna and Jane are essentially alone.
The two women, who have immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines and Korea in the 1970s, meet in a grocery store in the days before the holiday. They discover shared commonalities, including their status as wives of medical residents who have taken advantage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, which eliminated restrictive, nationality-based immigration quotas and provided new paths to U.S. citizenship for people from Asia, Africa and other non-European nations.
Extroverted Luna impulsively invites the introverted Jane over for Thanksgiving dinner, as their husbands will be working, to make the traditional holiday meal and get to know each other.
Theatreworks will mount playwright Lloyd Suh’s two-person comedy, “The Heart Sellers,” Thursday through Feb. 16 at Ent Center for the Arts.
The show’s title is a play on the immigration act, which allowed Asian people to come to America for math and science purposes, and the phrase home is where the heart is.
“A lot of Asian immigrants came in during the ’70s,” said Denver-based director Jenna Moll Reyes. “We explore what it means to leave home. ‘Heart Sellers’ leans into all these different themes.”
And why Thanksgiving?
“It’s a very American holiday and it is a show about these immigrant women. It ties into the fact pilgrims immigrated here as well. It’s that parallel,” Reyes said. “Because it has two Asian American Pacific Islander actors in it people will think this is maybe not for them, but this is really an American story told through an immigrant lens.”
Suh wrote the play, which premiered at the Milwaukee Rep in 2023, after conversations with a director about their mothers’ experiences immigrating to the U.S. The show also connects with Reyes, an Asian American Pacific Islander and Spanish artist, who starred in last year’s “12th Night” at Theatreworks.
“Seeing representation on stage is, first and foremost, a cool connection,” she said. “It does spread a specific lens when you have a director of color doing a show about them. It’s also a really good story and I love a small cast in a simple space. The story connects to me because my grandma was in the Philippines during the ’70s and I knew who these characters were.”
The show is also a tale of female friendship and the bonds women create, even when you don’t necessarily speak each other’s language. Sometimes communication is unspoken or fragmented, but that doesn’t mean the bond is any less strong.
“These two women are communicating with each other with their second language and trying to express how they feel and what’s going on in their world,” Reyes said.
“The power of communication in all forms, including art, is really special. And if you take the time to listen, no matter if you understand it or not, there is power in that.”
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source gazette.com ’