Hedgerow Theatre presents Celine Song’s Endlings

Song garnered Oscar nods for writing and directing the 2023 film Past Lives. Endlings, first staged in 2019, is a hybrid creature: part satire, part memory play, part theatrical essay. It’s a work that resists easy categorization, and director Kalina Ko leans into that with curiosity in this occasionally clunky but earnest production.

Diving in Man-Jae, adrift in Manhattan

The play follows two threads. On Man-Jae, a remote Korean island, three elderly haenyeos—female free divers who harvest seafood without oxygen tanks—continue their vanishing tradition. Tuyết Thị Phạm, Gray Choi, and Shigeko Sara Suga bring as much bravado as they can to these limiting roles.

Their scenes are the most visually striking, thanks in part to Marie Laster’s evocative set and Lily Fossner’s lighting, which conjure the sea with a minimal stage, except for a dream sequence featuring various movements by a haenyeo with help from white stagehands elevating the actor, and also a haenyeo in a red dress dancing around an immersive turtle (a throwback to an earlier conversation between the women).

Meanwhile playwright Ha Young (Sarah Shin) wrestles with her own creative paralysis in New York City. She’s haunted by expectations—of the theater industry, her imagined audience, and her own cultural inheritance—and confuses herself over her own writing and what the haenyeos represent. Shin’s performance is sharp (though there were some opening-night slips; Ha Young has long monologues), capturing the tension between sincerity and satire.

Wanting to drift further

Ko’s direction is thoughtful, if at times restrained. There’s a sense that the production is holding back, mainly due to the limitations of the source material. Song’s play seems to be uncertain of what it wants to achieve, and that ambiguity can lead to a disjointed experience. I found myself wondering what might emerge if Ko had drifted just a bit further from the script. After reviewing parts of the script online, I think Ko played it keenly, but perhaps too safely.

Still, the staging is confident, and the ensemble—rounded out by Scott Berkowitz, Ethan Goonewardene, Paul Harrold, John Harvey, and Kevin McCann—supports the play’s tonal shifts (and musings over the whiteness of theater) with agility.

Room to reflect

What lingers most is not a single image or line, but a question: what does it mean to stake a claim? Throughout the play, real estate is emphasized. For the haenyeos, their real estate is a longing for freedom, legacy, and the opportunity to provide for others, even though those others are no longer on the island. For Ha Young, it’s a matter of authorship and carving out space for herself. For the audience, it’s an invitation—to rent out real estate for a minute before heading home. Everyone involved has some access to these various forms of real estate.

Hedgerow’s Endlings doesn’t offer easy answers, and it didn’t satisfy as much as I hoped. But in its earnest attempt to navigate the murky waters of identity, tradition, and artistic voice, it finds something more valuable: a space for reflection.