Endlings, by playwriting alumna Celine Song ’14 is set to play at New York Theatre Workshop in the 2019/2020 season. Song’s play received its world premiere at the American Repertory Theatre. The multiplot story directed by Sammi Cannold, was selected for the 2018 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference.
Song is a staff writer for Amazon’s The Wheel of Time as well as a member of the Public Theater’s 2016-2017 Emerging Writers Group, Ars Nova’s 2014-2015 Play Group, and the Orchard Project’s inaugural NYC Greenhouse 2018.
Song's play Endlings takes place on the Korean island of Man-Jae, where three elderly haenyeos—sea women—spend their dying days diving into the ocean to harvest seafood. They have no heirs to their millennia-old way of life. Across the globe on the island of Manhattan, a Korean-Canadian playwright, twice an immigrant, spends her days wrestling with the expectation that she write “authentic” stories about her identity. But what, exactly, is her identity? And how can she write about it without selling her own skin?
The Boston Globe praised the A.R.T. production saying that Song “found a fascinating story to tell” in Endlings. The duo plot play was praised by The Harvard Crimson, who wrote “Endlings is beautifully constructed from page to production.”
Endlings will see a New York premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, with opening night and performance dates to be announced at a later date.