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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...