The Heart Sellers

The Heart Sellers is a play by Lloyd Suh about two immigrant women who meet by chance on Thanksgiving in 1973 and end up spending the holiday evening together. It is an intimate story with a warm and often funny tone, and the meal at its center refuses to come together.

MCC Theater presents the New York premiere in Hell's Kitchen, with performances set to begin in January 2027. The production belongs to the company's 2026-27 season, which MCC bills as its 40th anniversary season. May Adrales directs.

The play is new to New York but not new to the stage. It had its world premiere in Milwaukee in 2023 and was staged in Boston later that year, and the MCC run brings it to New York for the first time.

The play is set in the United States in 1973. Jane is a Korean immigrant and Luna is a Filipino immigrant. Both moved to the country with husbands whose jobs keep them busy and often away, so each woman spends much of her time far from home and still getting used to a new place.

On Thanksgiving, the two cross paths in a grocery store. Luna is shopping for a frozen turkey and has no idea how to cook it, and the meeting turns into a shared evening. From there the play follows their conversation: homesickness, small ambitions such as learning to drive, and the idea of one day visiting Disneyland.

This guide stops at the setup. How the evening ends is for the audience to find out.

The play centers on two roles, Jane and Luna. The Boston staging also credited a radio DJ as a voice-over. Its 1973 setting falls eight years after the Hart-Celler Act.

Suh's other plays include The Far Country, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2023, and The Chinese Lady, which was nominated for the 2022 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play. Away from the stage, he teaches at Princeton University, where his title is Professor of the Practice.

Milwaukee Repertory Theater commissioned The Heart Sellers for its new play development program. The first public performance took place on February 7, 2023, in the Stiemke Studio, with Jennifer Chang directing. That run continued through March 19, 2023.

The Huntington Theatre Company then staged the play at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston, from November 21 to December 23, 2023. Opening night was November 29, and Adrales directed.