The New York Theatre Workshop production of Celine Song’s debut play Endlings closed on March 12, 2020—a casualty of Covid-19 lockdowns. Five years later, Song’s play about three elderly Haenyeos (sea women) is making a comeback with a regional premiere at Philly’s Hedgerow Theatre through June 1, where the production has acquired fresh topicality as well as a new approach to its movement design for a piece that dives deeply into immigration and assimilation.
For director Kalina Ko, it’s a play that has lingered with her even since she first read the workshop draft in the O’Neill library as a 2019 literary intern, a year after the play had had a workshop and productions at American Repertory Theatre were in the works. As someone “drawn to plays that feel impossible,” when Hedgerow asked her to direct, Ko said she was “thrilled to see the play emerge again.”
When she saw it at NYTW, actor Tuyết Thị Phạm said she thought, “Wow, it’s so wonderful to have all of these older Asian women onstage, not as objects, but as people, and have the story centered around them.” Now that she’s been cast in Endlings, Phạm said, “It’s exciting for me—it’s a role that I wouldn’t normally get cast in.”
The play follows elderly Korean women who free dive for seafood in the ocean as they live out their dying days. For this production, Ko has problem-solved the “ocean” with the notion: What if there were no water?
“I want to bring the audience underwater with us,” said Ko. “What are the key pieces that someone needs to see or hear or feel to know that we’re underwater or that we’re swimming, or that we’re seeing these things?”
Those pieces, it turns out, are the rituals before the swimmers enter the water, and the swimming itself. This movement has been coordinated by JungWoong Kim, who has a background in contemporary dance and movement aesthetics. In working with Ko, Kim said, he was brought back to the time when he moved to the U.S. from Korea at age 34, when he didn’t speak any English. “I felt lost and invisible,” Kim said. “What helped me survive was contact improvisation. It became my first language here, a way to communicate with truth, even without words. It gave me connection, hope, and presence.”
When Ko said she wanted to bring the audience underwater, Kim said he didn’t think only about water. “I thought about resistance, pressure, and breath—about how to move when you feel surrounded by something larger than you. In our collaboration, we moved between ideas naturally. I guided the performers to explore breath, slowness, and touch. We worked not to imitate water, but to become part of it. To let the body hold that world and share it with the audience.”
In workshops with Kim, he first had the company focus on their own bodies. They then expanded into discovering each other’s bodies, exploring “how to move through the unknown together, not by solving it, but by breathing with it,” Kim said. In the process, they discovered “how powerful shared breath can be. When everyone inhales together and becomes silent, the whole space opens. It is not loud, but it speaks deeply.”
The training wasn’t just physical; it was emotional. It became a way to “practice trust, to stay curious, and to move through uncertainty with shared attention,” Kim said. “These are not just dance tools. They are tools for being with others, honestly.”
This physically manifested in images, from rolling around on top of each others’ backs to carrying and lifting people. They also used elements from contemporary dance like softness, off-balance, and collapse, but, Kim said, “always as ways to sense, not just perform.”
Dramaturgically, during the pre-swimming rituals, the characters are getting ready for the day, cleaning off, and preparing on land. These rituals are quiet and focused, including small, repeated gestures like breathing, circling, touching the ground, and offering with hands. For Kim, ritual “begins with breath. It moves out into space, then returns as breath again. A cycle. In that repetition, we notice change. This is a practice of awareness,” he said of these moments, which “help the performers return to themselves, to the group, and to memory.”
When it came to swimming, Ko described an image of how “three or four people form a platform, and then someone is on top of them, going through the motions of swimming.” Such motions are actually less literal than you’d think, according to Kim. “Swimming, in our work, is not literal. It is movement that feels like water. Flowing, drifting, resisting, supporting,” he said.
This manifests in several ways. Sometimes a body is lifted. Sometimes someone moves alone. Sometimes the group becomes still “and that stillness feels full,” Kim further explained. “It is like swimming through water and flying through air at the same time. Both hold the body, yet ask it to adapt. The current of water, the pull of gravity, the softness of temperature, the sharpness of wind. The body listens to all of it. Fast and slow. High and low. Deep and wide. Through movement, we feel these invisible forces with the skin, the bones, the breath.”
Echoing this, Phạm said that moving feels “heightened and suspended.” The process of discovering her physicality for this production has been centered on “a sense of recognizing that your body always has buoyancy in water.” Interestingly enough, wearing her hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, helps with that sensation; the comfort of culturally specific clothes brings support in stability for this movement.
Culturally specific conversations moved from the space to communities in Philly. The company, including some from out of town, has found kinship in sharing this “startingly still relevant” play with the city, Ko said. They attended a salon with community members hosted by former board executive Ann Byun, including folks who weren’t necessarily regular theatregoers, in efforts to “get people excited about the folks around her, which feels very in line with what I think Endlings is about: trying to connect with people and getting to know the folks around you,” Ko said.
Phạm, who works at Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre, noted that her home base is “a very diverse place with a plurality of points of views.” She wondered if Philly would be similar. “For the city of media and Rose Valley and Hedgerow to recognize and offer this—it’s been lovely to experience just how excited and grateful the members of the communities that I have met thus far are that we’re here,” she said.
Ko said she resonates with Song’s ideas of “what it means to be an immigrant, what it is to try and assimilate into American culture, and what it is to try and exist in an American theatre that wasn’t built for her.” One line refers to the idea that audiences coming into this theatre “is a little bit like being an immigrant. You’ve bought a ticket to come to this show,” Ko said.
“I think that that sort of invitation feels really exciting to me, the way that it’s about sort of modeling and sharing this experience, as opposed to being like, ‘Here is this thing, and you should feel bad,’” she continued. “It’s like, what if you also approximated your experience up to mine? And what does that look like? That feels like a particularly exciting way to tackle the topic of immigration right now, especially as I think an invitation is always more exciting than a lecture, if you will.”
Kim leaves us with the thought: We are all longing for something.
“It is not just about where we go, but how we are moved, and how we move together,” he said. “We eat when we are hungry. But what kind of hunger lives in our lives? Maybe it is the hunger to create. To move. To connect. A hunger to be seen, to be heard, to be touched. This work begins from that kind of hunger. Not just to perform, but to meet others in what we deeply long for.”
Daniella Ignacio, a writer, theatre artist and musician based in Washington, D.C., is a contributing editor of this magazine.
