YOU GOTTA HAVE HEART
Two young immigrant women find joy and hope in a budding friendship in Lloyd Suh’s The Heart Sellers, at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre through March 9. The show moves to TheatreWorks in Mountain View for a three-week run in April.
Adroitly directed by Jennifer Chang, the two-actor 90-minute one-act, an uproarious comedy of discovery, stars Nicole Javier as a Filipina named Luna (or “Lulu,” as her unseen husband calls her) and Wonjong Kim as her new friend, an extremely shy Korean woman named Jane.
It’s Thanksgiving, 1973, near the end of Richard Nixon’s reign as president. The two are “residency widows” whose husbands are on rotation at a nearby hospital. Luna pulls Jane into her sparsely-furnished but warmly inviting apartment to attempt roasting a rock-hard frozen turkey, the first of many forays into their joint exploration of all things American.
Together they revel in everything from roadside produce stands to overflowing discount chain stores to incomprehensible holidays to pop culture on TV. In a brightly-striped sweater and denim jumper (period-perfect costume design by Lisa Misako Claybaugh), Luna dashes about excitedly, gushing about her life back home, her apartment, but most of all her new life in America—and her new friend. Luna speaks excellent English, but Jane is less adept, with a thick accent, but begins to reveal hidden fluency as they get to know each other.
Its title a riff on the 1965 Hart-Cellars Act that removed restrictions on immigrants from Asia, Suh’s script is very much a peeling-away-layers-of-the-onion story. Luna and Jane confess that they have (or had) sisters on the wrong side politically in their home countries. They admit bafflement about Halloween, but love other holidays and the abundance of products at Kmart, and in fact, have identical coats from the same store. They like roadside produce stands and all the implied opportunities they anticipate will be theirs when their husbands finally fully enter their professions.
They drink cheap wine from garish containers and have laugh attacks like a couple of adolescent girls, joking about a naughty adventure like going out to see “a porno,” something they will never do, of course. They love watching Soul Train on Saturday afternoons, and dance goofily when a favorite song comes on the radio. It’s all a wonderful depiction of two new friends getting to know each other in a new country. Luna and Jane never do figure out how to cook that turkey—a task of no concern to them or to the audience.
With its harvest-gold appliances, avocado-colored rotary-dial phone, and plaid sofa, the set by Arnel Sangianco is also period-perfect. A portable lawn chair serves as extra seating, typical of the protracted student lifestyle endured by aspiring doctors and their spouses. One observer mentioned that the set’s predominantly yellow color is symbolic of Asia, and the oppression of Asian people, and that putting a Korean and a Filipina together in their new American home is some sort of cryptic commentary about western imperialism.
That’s all overblown nonsense. Yellow is the color of sunlight, of warmth and love and visibility. The Heart Sellers is simply a wonderfully engaging and delightfully performed romp through the joy of a new friendship. It’s a celebration, as uplifting as it can be—and today, we need all the uplift we can find.
photos by Kevin Berne
The Heart Sellers
Aurora Theatre
2081 Addison St. in Berkeley
ends on March 9, 2025
for tickets ($36-$68), call 510.843.4822 or visit Aurora Theatre
then plays Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St. in Mountain View
April 2-27, 2025
for tickets ($34-$115), call 877.662.8978 or visit TheatreWorks
Barry Willis is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association and president of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle. Contact: [email protected]
