Harvard Alumni Dive Into Work on ‘Endlings’

Several Harvard alumni have come together at the American Repertory Theater to contribute their perspectives to — and learn lessons from — the production of Celine Song’s new play “Endlings,” which runs from Feb. 26 to March 17 at the Loeb Drama Center. The alumni working to bring this story to life are director Sammi R. Cannold (who graduated the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2016 and is A.R.T.’s youngest ever female director), assistant director Brian J. Ge ’18, actors Mark J. Mauriello ’15 and Matt J. DaSilva ’12, and Kevin H. Lin ’12, who is Song’s agent.

The play follows two distinct stories in two distinct settings: The last three Korean sea women, known as “haenyeos,” harvest seafood in Man Jae, while a Korean-Canadian playwright grapples with her writing in Manhattan.

Other than Mauriello, all the Harvard alumni working on the play interned for the A.R.T. while attending Harvard, and a few of their paths intertwined in ways that eventually led to their collaboration on “Endlings.” Lin and Cannold met through the A.R.T., where Cannold was a Hasty Pudding Artistic Fellow, and later, Lin sent her the script of “Endlings.”

In turn, Cannold brought Ge onto “Endlings” and encouraged him to assistant direct, a job he had not done before. “She always gets me to do the craziest jobs,” Ge said.

Cannold and Ge have collaborated on multiple A.R.T. productions, including “The Pirate Princess,” through which they met in 2015, feminist poetry readings, and “Violet” in 2017, a show that traveled around Harvard Square on a shuttle.

Now, in their work on “Endlings,” these alumni have drawn a range of new understandings about education, American theater, and how to address their own racial and ethnic backgrounds, as well as unfamiliar ones, in personal and theatrical contexts.

“Most people didn’t know much about the haenyeos, who are the heroines of the play,” Cannold said. “Because of that, there was a large learning curve in terms of the culture.”

For Ge, the ability to see similarities between the play and his own life came with its own lessons.

“As an Asian Canadian myself, it’s just so rewarding to see a story unfold on stage and in a rehearsal room that's so incredibly relatable, that I feel I've lived or my parents have lived or my ancestors have lived, even though I'm not Korean,” Ge said. “I think that's been the biggest learning experience — that there's so much more to learn from people like yourself, and not necessarily always from the university education, from the ways that people tell you to learn.”

DaSilva and Mauriello portray white stage managers in the “Endlings” cast, and they reflected on their responsibilities as cast members of a play focusing on women of Korean descent.

“This show is not about us,” DaSilva said. “If we try at all to make it about us, then we're just de-servicing the story and taking away from the intention of the playwright and kind of disrespecting it in a way. My role is to not be thought about.”

Mauriello said he has found acting in “Endlings” to be invigorating. “It’s a really remarkable and exciting thing, as a white male, to see this show that is about four Asian women, and to watch the way they are sharing stories and unraveling identity, and doing it in a way that also pokes fun at the kinds of theater we’ve been seeing on stages for decades and decades, especially in America,” he said.

Cannold said she believes “Endlings” disrupts the status quo of American theater both by introducing the untold story of the haenyeos and, more broadly, by confronting racism in theater.

“Celine has written a play that is so bold, that says so much that I think so many of us are afraid to say or afraid to wrestle with,” Cannold said. “It confronts what it means for artists of color to tell certain stories or not tell certain stories.”

The play holds an expansive meaning for Ge, too. “At the end of the day, it's not just a story about the haenyeos. It’s a story about immigration. It’s a story about real estate. It’s a story about how much you have to give up to go somewhere where the life is better,” he said.

“So many of us here in this country have that story in our blood,” Ge said. “It's just impossible for me, as an immigrant, to look at this play and not want to call my grandmother.”