Ahead of rehearsals for Studio's production of The Heart Sellers, Artistic Producing Fellow Ella Talerico spoke with playwright Lloyd Suh about his artistic process, his Asian American history play cycle that The Heart Sellers caps, and the ways current events affect audience perspective.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ella Talerico: How did you come to write The Heart Sellers?
Lloyd Suh : So, it’s early 2019 and I’m at Milwaukee Rep for the opening night of my play The Chinese Lady. At that party, May Adrales [director of The Chinese Lady] and I started talking about our mothers’ experiences coming to the United States in the 1970s, sharing amusing anecdotes. I started thinking, “Oh, maybe I’ll do something with that.” At the time I’d been writing about forgotten or under-examined moments in Asian American history.
I had been writing The Far Country, which explores the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. I started connecting it to the Hart-Cellar Act [of 1965]. I realized these two pieces of legislation are like book ends. They’re part of a continuum. That big-picture arc made it possible to not just connect all my history plays in a set but also to make it personal to each set of characters.
Ella: What draws you to history?
Lloyd: It was involuntary at first; I was writing a play I thought was an adaptation of a murder mystery, but it turned into deconstructing stereotypes—this is Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery.
I was at a party chatting with Mia Katibok, the Artistic Director of the National Asian American Theatre Company. I offered this tidbit that the second most produced playwright in history—by a long shot—is Agatha Christie. And Mia—PATCO's mission is to reimagine classics with Asian American casts — said, “You should do an Agatha Christie.” Mia told me to look at Poirot. I didn’t think I could do it, because Poirot is this unassuming foreigner. A little overweight, socially awkward, has a mustache, and people don’t take him seriously. I told her, “If I do this with an Asian guy, it’s Charlie Chan,” And she said, “Exactly. That’s why you have to do it.”
I was skeptical, but as I was doing working on the show, researching Asian American history, kept coming across things I felt I had to spend more time with—just on a personal level.
The first of those things was Afong Moy. [Ed. Note: Afong Moy came to the U.S. from China in 1843, is allegedly the first Chinese woman in the U.S., and spent much of her life as a “living exhibit” on display for the American public. Suh’s play The Chinese Lady imagines her life.]
I couldn’t shake this tidbit of information it made me want to go down a rabbit hole—but there is none. There’s so little information about Afong that you’re done in 15 minutes. I felt that absence. I didn’t know how to resolve it. She was a performer, but she was put on display. One of the reasons she resonated with me is because I work in the performing arts.
I’m constantly thinking about the way we present to an audience. What is it to be looked at? What is it to feel a discrepancy between the way others see you and the way you see yourself?
As I went through her story, I realized how the Exclusion Acts were a catalyst. You can still see their effects in terms of stereotypes, economics, geography, how Chinatowns were built—it all comes from legislation.
That made me think, “Oh, I have to write something around The Exclusion Act.” To give myself—maybe redemption, maybe recognition, maybe catharsis. It’s like healing. I want to make this pain go away.
It’s not fun to write about the most painful parts of your history. So, The Heart Sellers was a gift, once I understood the assignment, which was, “Oh. These two want to make each other happy. They want to be friends.” What a gift! To realize, “This is a play about the pursuit of joy.”
Ella: How does joy influence your practice?
Lloyd: I want all my plays to be funny and fun to work on. When I was in graduate school, my playwriting professor Romulus Linney said, "When you’re writing you should be laughing or crying. If you’re not, you should be trying to make yourself laugh or cry.”
Most of the writing process for The Heart Sellers was trying to locate the highest moment and the lowest moment, “How can I let them be as high and low as they need to be?”
Ella: I hear a lot of love for your actors; how does that change your approach?
Lloyd: I can’t think about the audience because there's an interpretive layer. My job is to write for the actors. They are taking my words and memorizing them. It’s a level of engagement that doesn’t exist in other arts. They’re going to get up in front of strangers and embody this person thinking about the character’s psychology, behavior, and history.
I want to make it worth their time. Not just fun but also fulfilling. Whatever I’m looking for in a play—healing a wound or redemption or catharsis—then I have to create conditions where an actor finds that, too.
Ella: What have you learned about The Heart Sellers, seeing it in different productions?
Lloyd: It’s not even different productions. It's different times.
As a writer, I try to leave room for history to resonate. What does it mean to talk about Richard Nixon in 1973 versus now? I was writing this during the pandemic and Trump's second impeachment process. One of the characters says, “It’s a pretty bad time in America, too.” It’s interesting to let the audience bring the news of the day to the play.
During the course of different runs, a South Korean president declared martial law. The Marcos family is running the show in the Philippines, again. Not to mention thinking about immigration and how the laws we create, we also change.
So, it’s almost like despite it all, Jane and Luna are going to have a good time tonight. It might be over in the morning, but tonight they’re going to have a good time.