Review: Poignant humor and a longing for belonging power Guthrie's must-see 'Heart Sellers'

Lloyd Suh's one-act play is about immigrant strangers who become fast friends one Thanksgiving Day.

By Rohan Preston Star Tribune

December 20, 2024 — 3:08pm

Ever invited a stranger you met at the supermarket back to your messy apartment for ordinary wine, Ritz crackers and cheese squeezed from a bottle?

It's a measure of the keenness of Luna's loneliness that she does so on Thanksgiving Day in 1973 in "The Heart Sellers," Lloyd Suh's comedy that's getting a wittily inviting production at the Guthrie Theater.

A garrulous extrovert, Luna (Jenna Agbayani) deals with the weirdness of the invite by telling Jane (Juyeon Song) that she's no weirdo. Both of their immigrant husbands are working long hours on the holiday and she's just looking for company. Besides, they both were wearing the same Kmart coat.

A charmingly disarming production staged with breezy aplomb by May Adrales and acted with blithe efficacy by Agbayani and Song, Suh's one-act comedy does something that strong art always aspires to. It gives us new eyes on the world. In this case, the perspectives are of two women from, respectively, the Philippines and South Korea.

The new friends couldn't seem more different. Luna is an effusive extrovert with big hand gestures and curious dreams. She wants to know and try everything because, well, the world is big, and she wants to take its full measure.

Jane, by contrast, is spare and introspective, with the quietude of a wounded bird.

But as this odd couple imbibe more and more wine and break out in a "Soul Train" dance tribute — in one of the production's giddier moments — we see that they're closer than even they imagined. In the end, even as they wrestle with what to do with a frozen turkey, they are as close as pajama buddies.

Suh's language and dialogue work in delectably free associative ways. The discussion between the two women goes from, say, Richard Nixon, who is denying that he's a crook on the radio to men overcompensating for their small penises to each of the women realizing that the only men they've ever seen naked are their husbands.

Agbayani and Song physicalize the language and situations with expressive dexterity. When Song's Jane talks about the scent of rain or how beaches differ in their smells from country to country, it's like someone describing an ordinary thing that we know but are experiencing again with a child's eye.

When Agbayani sings a Filipino resistance song, we feel the manifold truth and authenticity in her notes. This is not just a play that these two are performing, but something of deep affirmation and vitality.

So, yes, go for the laughs and the pathos in "Heart Sellers," studded as it is with insightful, telling little details. Go for the language, deftly scripted by Suh and met with a similar kind of poetry by Adrales in her staging.

But the best quality about the show is its revelatory joy. Even as it makes its observations with comically wry poignancy, "Heart Sellers" dips and swims in the waters of wistful wonder.