Imagine it’s Thanksgiving 1973, and you’re bringing home a stranger to cook a turkey. Though home isn’t quite the right word to describe the little apartment in an unfamiliar country that is far from your own. In Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers, now playing at Stages, this is exactly where we meet two women, Luna and Jane.
Luna and Jane are strangers before meeting in an empty supermarket on Thanksgiving, both considering the turkeys and wearing the same Kmart coat. The coats, it turns out, aren’t all they have in common. Both are recent immigrants to the United States – Luna from the Philippines and Jane from South Korea – with husbands who are doctors-to-be, first-year residents who leave their wives alone for long periods of time.
On this Thanksgiving evening, neither’s husband will be home until well into the A.M. Jane is the first person to visit Luna’s apartment, and Luna’s excitement is as palpable as her loneliness, which it soon becomes clear Jane also shares. Luna can’t drive and stays home a lot. Jane stays home, too, watching TV all day – The Price is Right, The Young and the Restless, Sanford and Son, Sesame Street.
She also watches Julia Child, so she takes the lead as the two attempt to cook a completely frozen turkey. With no one else to talk to, everything closed, and hours to pass, the two young women begin to open up to each other – with a little help from a bottle of wine – about their lives before and their lives now.
The Heart Sellers made its world premiere back in February 2023, its title is a homophonic reference to the Hart-Celler Act, the more familiar name of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Before the act, quota systems were used to restrict immigration to mostly people from “Europe or white people places,” as Luna puts it. The act ended existing quota systems and opened the door to highly skilled immigrants from non-European countries and countries across Asia and Africa.
The one-act play itself is a 90-minute slice of life that’s light on plot but heavy on heart, an exercise in empathy that manages to be deeply touching while still eliciting big laughs in turns. Suh has a knack for dialogue and a way with metaphors (in particular, Luna’s explanation of what she thinks of when she hears “Hart-Cellar,” and its later payoff, is an absolute heart-wrencher).
Throughout the script, Suh masterfully conveys the subtle yet profound ways immigrating has and will have on Luna and Jane. It’s in the differences they’ve found in everything from the taste of yams to the type of dust that collects on the furniture, with Luna at one point saying, “Even the rain smells confusing.” It’s in Jane’s quiet musing about her life as a soccer game she watches someone else play. It’s in Luna’s prescient awareness of what’s to come – a future where this move will isolate her from her family back home, her still unborn American children, and even herself.
Miranda Cornell, who notably worked on the Tony-winning musical The Outsiders last year as associate director, helms this production with compassion and clarity, allowing us to linger in the awkward lulls that come naturally to such getting-to-know-you arcs, refusing to shy away from the emotion that bubbles to the surface and sometimes pours out, and offering us a big, cathartic laugh at times. The production is intimate, with much warmth generated by the budding bond between Luna and Jane, played by Mai Lê and Alexandra Szeto-Joe.
Lê is an excitable motor mouth when we first meet Luna, her nervous energy overwhelming Szeto-Joe’s Jane, who stands stock still in Luna’s apartment, with little more to say than a quiet “mmm.” At first, when Szeto-Joe speaks, it’s as if it takes physical effort. That is until she starts talking turkey (literally). A few mugs of wine later, Szeto-Joe’s Jane – who speaks in an amazingly consistent accent, credit to Dialect Coach Joy Lanceta Coronel – becomes more loose-lipped and reassuring, while Lê’s happy countenance as Luna wears thinner and thinner.
Both Lê and Szeto-Joe, dressed to fit well into Sears’ 1973 Fall/Winter catalog by Costume Designer Gisell Rubio, navigate Suh’s quick pivots from vulnerability to buddy comedy with ease. It’s a treat to watch their relationship grow in Luna’s corner set studio apartment, by Scenic Designer Zhuosi “Joyce” He with properties design by Jodi Bobrovsky. With its rotary phone on the wall, Formica tabletop, and avocado green range and matching refrigerator, the place is carefully lived in and indicative of 1970s Americana.
The action in the apartment occurs under the yellow-hued flush-mounted lights, with Christina R. Giannelli’s stolid lighting designs understated until narrowing down softly and poignantly on Luna and Jane during the play’s final moments, a move that ends the play with a spotlighted focus on hope, easing us out as gently as the strains of a piano led us in. Sound design, by Anthony Barilla and Chris Bakos, is particularly strong in its world-building, from the simple sound of a toilet flush in another room to the wonky radio and TV bits we hear.
Suh’s play is careful to emphasize the fact that Luna and Jane are not only immigrants in a new country, they are also women, with all the frustrations that come along with watching the choices the men in their lives – the ones they’re married to and the ones in office – make. This play has an air of intentional political timeliness seen in a radio news report commenting on Richard Nixon’s refusal to turn over his taxes and Luna and Jane’s mutual dislike of him. The parallel it’s drawing gives the show a sense of relevance, though it’s not particularly incisive. In this time and place, the concerns about Nixon seem almost quaint by comparison.
That doesn’t, however, lessen the appeal of The Heart Sellers, which can be found in its centering of Luna and Jane’s immigrant experience and its powerful portrayal of a friendship between women in desperate need of support. Suh tells a deeply human story, thoughtfully brought to life by the crew over at Stages, so full of heartache and humor that it’s guaranteed to have you laughing even as tears spring to your eyes.
Performances will continue at 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through February 23 at The Gordy, 800 Rosine. For more information, call 713-527-0123 or visit stageshouston.com. $34-$79.
