Media Archive

Endlings Playwright Celine Song and Director Sammi Cannold share their journeys to this underwater world premiere.

The donation from David E. ’93 and Stacey L. Goel will enable Harvard to imagine a 21st-century research and performance center on Allston campus.

A look into the wetsuits seen on stage in Endlings.

Endlings is the first play that I wrote without any thought toward how it would be produced or what it would do for my career. It is the play that taught me not to care about what the artistic directors and literary managers would say.

“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.