Endlings by Celine Song

Reviewed by: Endlings by Celine Song Vivian L. Huang ENDLINGS. By Celine Song. Directed by Sammi Cannold. New York Theatre Workshop, New York City. February 29, 2020. If it feels like the end of the world—and indeed the New York run of Endlings was paused due to Covid-19 public health measures—then this show fittingly takes up the romance of being “the last known individuals of a species.” Featuring Korean and Korean American women characters whose narratives are mediated through multiple framing devices, Endlings offers us a text for analyzing the queer negativity of Asian women’s lives in the American theatre. The play opens with a quotidian scene of divers Han Sol, Go Min, and Sook Ja preparing for their daily seaside work, before a voiceover interjects and introduces the octogenarian women as haenyeos, practitioners of a revered but nearly extinct women-led diving tradition in Man-Jae, South Korea. Although the voiceover narrates with morbid fascination, the haenyeos refuse self-pity for being the last of their kind and speak directly to the audience. Go Min snarks, “Who will inherit my life? No one, I hope.” Nor do the women romanticize their work on an isolated island. Instead, the play shifts to the haenyeos’ solitary, widowed, and empty-nested home lives that revolve around a remote control. Han Sol extols television (“Hollywood forever!”) and instructs, “Don’t live on an island, unless it is Manhattan.” Cue fadeout and scene shift: enter Ha Young, a Korean Canadian playwright who laments to the audience her bind as an emerging, US-based artist whose funders all but demand she represent The Ethnic Experience. In the Manhattan apartment shared with her White Husband—who is, as a sign around his neck informs, “also a playwright”—Ha Young speaks fondly of her “wall of white artist boyfriends” (for example, Albee, Beck-ett, Brecht) and longs to be a successful playwright without “selling [her] skin” for art. The play then swerves fully into the absurd when Ha Young and White Husband join the audience in the house as all watch a “couch play” onstage where five White Stage Managers line up and perform the same comically abstract lament to the audience, one after the other. In the dream-like closing scene of Endlings, Song veers into the sentimental when Han Sol and Ha Young deliver parallel monologues that reflect on place, endurance, and purpose. Ultimately, Ha Young voices her desire to “win” by “dominat[ing] the audience” with her writing and thereby claiming a piece of Manhattan real estate. Click for larger view View full resolution Emily Kuroda (Go Min), Jo Yang (Sook Ja), and Wai Ching Ho (Han Sol) in Endlings. (Photo: Chad Batka.) Such an insistence on winning seems an ironic ending for a play called Endlings. Being the final member of a genealogical line is a familiar provocation for queers, diasporics, and queer diasporics who do not plan to reproduce along blood or national lines and so function, as Sara Ahmed and Gayatri Gopinath have written, as the end of the line. In Endlings, the haenyeos could be said to inhabit this queer position; the women not only look forward to death, but also forbid their children from carrying on the diving tradition. The haenyeos embrace that their life’s work will likely die as they will—unremarkably. As Han Sol asks, “If we don’t talk about the dead chicks, who will?” Embodying [End Page 345] this queer position is all the more risky for women, whose symbolic value historically depends on their material reproductivity. In the aesthetic tradition of the United States, Asian women have been cast queerly toward death at the same time as Asian women have functioned to reproduce white hetero-norms. Endlings gestures to the aestheticization of Asian female death by staging that of Sook Ja, the youngest of the three haenyeos and the only one without children. Yet the play romanticizes Sook Ja’s death by later showing her underwater in a long red gown holding hands with an anthropomorphized turtle foreshadowed in an earlier dream as her husband. This romanticization suggests that Sook Ja is happier underwater; the fact that she is

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