What do you do when you’re out shopping and you see another person wearing the exact same coat you are currently wearing? Invite them over to your home, of course. 

That’s the premise of “The Heart Sellers,” a play by Lloyd Suh, directed by May Adrales at the Guthrie Theater. The two women are Luna and Jane, and the year is 1973. Their multi-colored striped jackets were both purchased at K-Mart. They happen to both be immigrants from different countries, and it’s Thanksgiving. 

The play takes place over the course of one evening in an unnamed midsize U.S. city. The two women get to know each other in a large studio apartment Luna shares with her husband.

In Wilson Chin’s set design, we see the exterior of a nondescript apartment building in the background, with drab windows and an American flag at the top. In the foreground, Luna’s kitchen appliances are colored a faded lime green, and the couch is decorated with a 70s-era knitted blanket. It’s a spacious apartment, and cozy enough. 

Luna’s husband never arrives. He’s a doctor who works nights. Jane’s husband, also a doctor, works nights, too, so the two women have all night to get to know each other. 

Playwright Suh’s work has been produced previously in the Twin Cities by the Children’s Theatre, Theater Mu and Open Eye Theater, and he’s well-known nationally. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 2020, and his play “The Far Country” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Back in 2022, I wrote about Suh’s “Bina’s Six Apples,” an epic story of a family journey set in the midst of the Korean War. “The Heart Sellers” is a much more intimate piece, but like “Bina’s Six Apples,” it illuminates a moment in history.

Its title is a play on the Heart-Celler Act, named after Sen. Philip Hart and Rep. Emanuel Celler, who introduced the bill — also called the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 — to Congress. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law, the act reversed direction on centuries of racist immigration policies in the U.S., like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and other laws meant to prevent the flow of immigration from non-North Western European countries.  

U.S. immigration policy was so racist, Adolf Hitler praised it in “Mein Kampf,” stating: “The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.” 

The Hart-Sellers Act got rid of discrimination based on country of origin and created a preference system that put relatives of U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents and professionals with special skills at the top of the list. 

As wives of immigrant doctors, the two women in “The Heart Sellers” benefitted from the new legislation. Their marriages to highly-skilled workers meant an opportunity to live in America. But we learn in the play that this opportunity comes with a cost to them, as well, including leaving their loved ones at home. We also begin to see that the marriages of these two women have a lot to be desired. 

Jenna Agbayani plays Luna, the more forward of the two women. She’s the one that we learn approached Jane at the store and invited her home. She talks fast at the beginning of the play, eager to make friends, in some ways too forceful to the more reserved Luna. To help smooth things along, she offers wine, which Luna hesitantly accepts. 

As Jane, Juyeon Song is tightly wound at first. She speaks fewer words than Luna, and often interjects non-word utterances. When she says “hm” or “uh” or sighs breathily, these vocalizations are laced with subtext. Eventually, she allows a spirited, almost rebellious, personality to appear in spurts as the evening progresses.  

Not much actually happens in the play. Luna has bought a turkey, and Jane offers advice about how to cook it. It turns out Jane is an avid Julia Child fan, and watches many other cooking shows. Together they make an attempt at cooking an American Thanksgiving meal — at least as well as they can with the ingredients they have available. 

Really, this is a story about two people who are incredibly lonely. Both seem to have no community outside of their husbands, who are always at work. Speaking English to each other, they take a crash course about each other’s lives. While they come from different cultures, they have a lot in common.  

Between Suh’s script and Adrales’ direction, there are lots of pauses in the production, both within dialogue and during interludes when one woman is going to the bathroom and the other has a moment to contemplate their conversation. The two actors are able to hold this quiet energy, but it does take work as an audience member to keep up with what is essentially one conversation of 90 minutes. 

After several glasses of wine, the women begin to lose their inhibitions. I thought at certain points there may be a romance developing between them, but I think it was more a growing intrigue and admiration. When you find a new friend, there can be a feeling similar to falling in love. 

They both are dissatisfied in their relationships with their husbands — both in the way they are treated and in their sexual lives. 

I found myself wondering as I was watching why these two women didn’t have children. I actually had to look up the history of birth control when I got home; the play is set in 1972, the year birth control pills became legal in all 50 states after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. 

They don’t talk about birth control, however, and while their discussion revolves around certain themes that came to the forefront of second-wave feminism, which was at its peak in the early 70s, they don’t use that word. 

In “The Feminist Movement: Where Are All the Asian American Women?,” which Esther Ngan-Ling Chow published in the U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal in 1992, the author talks about Asian women often being sidelined from mainstream feminism during the second wave. 

“Their relative lack of political activism stems from cultural, psychological, and

social oppression which historically discouraged them from organizing,” she wrote. Immigration policy itself proved a barrier, which is true of the women in the play. Their immigration status is tied to their marital status. Ngan-Ling Chow added that white women of the second wave played a role in excluding Asian women, especially by not showing sympathy for their priorities or concerns. 

Instead, Luna and Jane talk of dreams — of children, a neighborhood. They also talk of escape. Of running away, of partying at a night club. Of leaving their husbands. 

We don’t really know how the women will choose to act on these dreams as morning breaks. Perhaps they’ll continue on as things have been, perhaps start families, move to the suburbs eventually. We can only hope, as observers of the story, they will remain in each other’s lives, and see what possibilities their friendship brings.

“The Heart Sellers” runs through Jan. 25 at the Guthrie Theater. More information can be found here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].

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