Feature: THE HEART SELLERS at Penguin Rep Theatre

As I watched the compelling two-hander dramedy The Heart Sellers at Penguin Rep Theatre in Stony Point (N.Y.), where it completes its run Sunday, July 26, it struck me that we were being afforded a privileged perspective into the world of United States immigrants from the inside out, which is to say, from their vantage point.

You can read a full review of the production HERE by my BroadwayWorld.com colleague Pia Haas who, as ever, incisively articulates what makes the show work as well as it does, drawing on her own extensive expertise as a veteran theater director.

To complement Ms. Haas’s excellent analysis of The Heart Sellers, here I share ruminations on the valuable insight I gleaned about the immigrant experience in the U.S., thanks to a craftily constructed script by Lloyd Suh, keen direction by Maria Mileaf, and spot-on performances by Anika Braganza (as a Filipino named Luna) and Mia Mooko (a Korean named Jane).

Mr. Suh has done natural-born Americans like me a service in educating us about how our own country is viewed from “afar,” even after those from afar have landed on our freedom-hugging shores.  

The play’s title is a word play on the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, named after its congressional sponsors. The landmark legislation upended the antiquated and inherently racist prior policy of national origins, whereby non-Americans were admitted based on their country of origin. The enlightened new act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, ignored that quota system – which saw about 70% of people emigrating from just three lands. Instead, the criteria had to do with the person’s reason for relocating here, favoring those coming here to work and study, such as aspiring doctors, thus contributing to America’s growth, strength and spirit.

(News Item > In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration could move forward with stripping Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants.)

The Heart Sellers is set at Thanksgiving 1973. The two women, who have just met in a supermarket, are each alone for the holiday because both husbands are young doctors completing their residency and are assigned to the hospital’s graveyard shift. Big-hearted Luna invites Jane to spend the holiday – which of course is not at all their nationality’s holiday – with her. We then are treated to the two confronting a turkey whose sheer size and rock-solid frozen state intimidates and confuses the new arrivals.

At one point, as Luna is sharing her reverie over the bountiful goods on display in Kmart, the feeling washed over me that we take so much for granted about our relative good fortune, relative to places like South Korea and the Philippines, which are the places of origin for the two characters.

The richness that America affords – both materialistically and humanistically – is easily taken for granted. Sometimes we forget it’s not an achievement to be born here. Entering the world as American is a happy circumstance over which we have no say or sway. Those not born here who come here often appreciate it even more than we do. They don’t take it for granted.

We see that, to humorous effect, in Luna’s and Jane’s fascination with artifacts of the American lifestyle, such as bowling, disco, TV icons like Julia Child, Archie Bunker, Soul Train, comfort food like Ritz crackers, “smashed” potatoes, worldwide newspapers available in the library to read free.

There was a shock of recognition listening to Luna’s wide-eyed amazement at what is on offer at a big box store in these United States. While the copyright on Mr. Suh’s script is date stamped 2023, Luna’s giddiness is virtually identical to recent news reports this summer of how foreigners visiting America for the World Cup were incredulous at the sight of endless aisles of merchandise of seemingly infinite variety in Costco.

Mr. Suh has Luna enthuse, “I love Kmart! So much things! Sometimes I go even when I don’t have nothing I need to buy, I like to just look at all the things there on display like I’m at a museum, you know?”

Compare that to this Instagram post by one Kate Henderson that I gleaned from an AI Overview: “International visitors attending the FIFA World Cup went viral on social media for experiencing extreme culture shock at American supermarkets, with one tourist famously joking that walking through Costco feels like visiting a historical museum.”

The striking similarity of those observations – with the common keyword “museum” – leads one to surmise either Mr. Suh is remarkably prescient or, perhaps, he selectively updated his script in the last couple of weeks.  

The point being what we don’t think twice about as lucky denizens of this 250-year-old democratic republic is looked on with envy from places around the globe less fortunate and just less, well, everything.

And yet, even then, Mr. Suh deftly deploys some political parallelism to also remind us that, in some very disturbing ways, America in 1973, when the play is set, was not totally different from Korea or the Philippines.

We eavesdrop on then-President Richard M. Nixon, of scandalous Watergate infamy, on the radio delivering his famously desperate (and inadvertently self-deprecating) declaration, “I am not a crook.”

Regardless of one’s political persuasions, it’s likely not lost on most audience members that the playwright is discerning a throughline from 1973 to our nation’s reigning leadership in our semiquincentennial year. In fact, the writer gets in his digs even further on the current state of affairs. The radio news also informs us “Nixon will not release his tax records.” From the view here in 2026, that sounds like foreshadowing.

Just as it doesn’t faze some latter-day citizens when their leaders transgress, Luna and Jane have a similar sangfroid reaction to the Nixon follies. “Government is always corrupt, so what?” says Luna. She allows how in the Philippines there is martial law and suspension of the Constitution. To her pragmatic state of mind, the corruption emanating from Washington, D.C. isn’t a big shock and isn’t atypical. In her life experience, it’s the way of the world. The ladies hold forth too on how power corrupts men in power. They have a few choice words about men compensating for certain, uh, shortcoming physically by puffing up their chest and abusing power. Such is the patriarchy that is as woven into the national consciousness as motherhood and apple pie.

The over-arching message Lloyd Suh effectively communicates through his skillful writing and thematic development is that, as great as our homeland is in so many ways, the American dream is not necessarily the American reality for immigrants in ways that those of us born here are not privy to, and so cannot – or choose not to – sympathize with.

As she confides in Jane, Luna feels once she was processed by immigration at the airport upon arrival in her new home. She had sold her heart to this new home and ever since has been conflicted about having to compromise by making a new life dictated by the new terms of a new country to which she has no meaningful natal connection.

The Heart Sellers is an important work, as educational as it is entertaining. It is about immigrants sacrificing their hearts for a shot at the American dream. Alas, the dream does not always match up so easily to the reality of being a stranger in a strange new land.

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