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Endlings (a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, selected for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and included on the 2017 Kilroys list) begins on the remote island of Man-Jae, Korea, where three elderly women spend their dying days free diving into the ocean to harvest seafood. These haenyeos — “sea women”— are the last practitioners of their millennium-old tradition.
Meanwhile, on the island of Manhattan, a Korean Canadian playwright navigates external expectations of how her own identity intersects with the stories she tells. In a reflection of the relationship between narrative and identity that is at once whimsical, poetic, surprising and satirical, Song’s play reveals how the stories we tell can obscure entire peoples, and asks: how are we to remove ourselves from an entrapping culture while we simultaneously perpetuate it for our own self-interest?
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