Review: In 'Endlings,' the Pain of Swimming Between Worlds

These are “free” divers — they use no tanks or scuba gear — who for centuries have scraped together a living by harvesting seafood from the waters off a small island at the tip of the Korean Peninsula. A few thousand are still at it, and if they survive the sharks and the whirlpools and the bends, they may continue diving deep into old age.

Still, the three (fictional) haenyeos in Song’s play “Endlings,” which opened Monday at New York Theater Workshop, see themselves as the end of their line; hence the title. But so, it seems, does Song, who in trying to broaden the scope of her tale makes tenuous connections between the “last mermaids” of her native country and her own plight as an immigrant playwright. Living on another small island — Manhattan — she is, like the haenyeos, swimming between worlds.

These two aspects of “Endlings” unfortunately feel like separate works, both worthy but neither complete. And director Sammi Cannold’s two-tone production — which had its debut last year at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts — only emphasizes the separation. The haenyeos are introduced during the first 20 minutes of the 90-minute play as if they were the subjects of a dopey documentary from the 1950s: “These proud matriarchs earn a living and provide for their families,” a disembodied announcer explains.

The tone remains coolly presentational and mildly satirical even as the women speak for themselves. Sook Ja (Jo Yang), the youngest at 78, is “the fun one,” still primping in hopes of attracting sea creatures or perhaps the ghost of her long-dead husband. At 83, Go Min (Emily Kuroda) is the ferocious one, having been beaten by her own long-dead husband and beating their children in turn. “What do you do with them if you don’t beat them?” she asks with a shrug. The philosophical one, Han Sol (Wai Ching Ho), 96, has no answers, living only for television. “Hollywood forever,” she says, improbably.

Into this diorama-like depiction of their habits and habitat — the wet suits, the plunges, the nets of abalone and seaweed — the playwright herself eventually wanders, or an obvious stand-in for her named Ha Young. A playwright herself, Ha Young (Jiehae Park) is in the midst of a theatrical crisis involving this very play, whose composition and especially completion have proved especially difficult.

Like Song, Ha Young has previously found success writing what she calls “white plays”: the kind, often involving people talking on a couch, in which nationality and race are not pressing concerns. (Song’s “Tom & Eliza,” seen in New York in 2016, seems to be a model.)

But having been “bribed” by the hungry attention of white sponsors to write about the “old Korean female divers,” she is drawn into the conundrum of identity as commodity. “I don’t want to sell my skin for theater,” she says — but she doesn’t want to ignore her skin either.

Expressing that real and wrenching conflict through drama has long been a rite of passage for writers from all kinds of marginalized communities. But Song subverts her argument by pushing it too hard. At one point, Ha Young and her husband — who wears a sign around his neck that reads “WHITE HUSBAND (also a playwright)” — attend a “white play” so deliberately bad that its satire sails right past whatever mark it was meant to hit. “I white perceive something that white upsets me,” goes a typical line of its dialogue.

That this “white play” is depicted as a production of New York Theater Workshop is a complicated meta-jab. Song has noted that most of the playwrights in her personal pantheon — Brecht, Beckett, Albee, Shawn — are white men. Is she mocking her work as unworthy of theirs? Or is she mocking theirs in order to make room for something more authentically hers?

Maybe both, but it’s hard to say. As “Endlings” alternates between the young playwright’s self-absorption and the old divers’ self-abnegation, the tone eventually spirals into surrealism.

The design team — especially Jason Sherwood (sets) and Linda Cho (costumes) — gives us haunting underwater vignettes involving a giant turtle and declaiming clams. The haenyeos swim by as if exhibits in an aquarium. Pretty as this may be, it takes us further from the facts of both stories; Song’s frantic attempts to hustle between them eventually give the play a bad case of the dramaturgical bends.

That’s a shame, because the haenyeos, whose traditional role at the center of a matriarchal society goes unexplored, could have been more than prompts for a personal essay. As it is, they are mostly a subject in search of a theme — a theme the playwright never convincingly harvests from a sea that does not easily give up its treasures.

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Production Notes:

“Endlings”

Tickets: Through March 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; 212-460-5475, nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Credits: By Celine Song; directed by Sammi Cannold; sets by Jason Sherwood; costumes by Linda Cho; lighting by Bradley King; sound by Elisheba Ittoop and Ien DeNio; music by Elisheba Ittoop; stage manager, Alfredo Macias. Presented by New York Theater Workshop in association with American Repertory Theater, Diane Paulus, artistic director and Diane Borger, executive producer.

Cast: Wai Ching Ho, Emily Kuroda, Jo Yang, Jiehae Park, Miles G. Jackson, Matt DaSilva, Mark Mauriello, Keith Michael Pinault and Andy Talen.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .