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“Every casting director would tell you — even the amazing ones who are very good at casting people of color — that it’d be a difficult group to cast,” Song said.

The key to writing what Song considers her “impossible” play was finding her own multifaceted voice…while striving to excel in a form defined largely by European-American men.

For Ho, her character in “Endlings” felt identifiable…“I’m Chinese and they’re Korean, but we share quite a lot of common ground,” Ho said. “The sense of humor, their work ethic, a lot of it are quite similar.”

“My play has been a journey to not apologize for how complicated and idiosyncratic my identity is as an immigrant.”

“The character, as written, is very much pure Celine, but since there is this Venn diagram of our experiences as Korean-born playwrights working in America, we share a lot.”

Celine Song had nothing to lose…But at 28, she was done with theater. Her plays, she says, were “too weird for Midtown and not weird enough for Downtown…“I thought it was the last play I was ever going to write, so I wrote a crazy play,” she says. “I wrote it for my spirit.”

Song wanted to write a play in which the Asian women reclaim their versions of the story—in a production that refuses whitewashing and acknowledges the politics around who gets to tell this story.

“A lot of the play centers on what it means that this culture is going extinct, but it’s also surprisingly comedic,” [director Sammi] Cannold said. “[Playwright Celine] Song is deeply funny and writes boldly. The play makes you think hard, surprises you, and alarms you.”

It can be said that the haenyeo live in two worlds. Everyday, these women straddle the thin line separating land and sea, life and death, a past in which they thrived and a future in which they may cease to exist, their daughters and granddaughters living in vastly different worlds far away. Reading about them, I immediately intuit the deep metaphorical connection between their stories and Celine’s, as well as mine: immigrants, like haenyeo, live between worlds, on the precipice of great cultural loss.

We can learn much from “Othello” about the gendering of hate, as a riveting production onstage at the American Repertory Theater powerfully shows…Watching this play in 2019 in the context of a long overdue reckoning with male violence is to see how misogyny is intertwined with racism and xenophobia, and is central to understanding what motivates violent men.

Moments of rare joy and celebrations of survival are part of the premise of “Anthem”…The name of the show is described as an unapologetic battle cry: “…In the shadow of a world that wants us dead, we will not go down without a fight. We will survive.”

At Bushwick Starr, Diana Oh and her team of “super queero heart questers” welcome guests to a night of dance-filled revelry.