Guthrie counterprograms holiday season with a wry ‘Heart Sellers’ over wine and turkey

How well do you know your parents — those know-nothings who raised and encouraged you, loving you the best they knew how?

Theater director May Adrales appreciates her parents much better today not simply because of their support during the ups-and-downs of a herky-jerky arts life. Her father, a surgeon, and her mother, a nurse, also serve as motivation.

“There was no other family that, quote-unquote, looked like us in the rural Virginia community where I grew up, and so my parents weren’t very talkative or outgoing,” Adrales said. “Then when I went as a young adult with them to the Philippines, I got a glimpse of two people that I felt like I’d never met. They were loquacious, confident, charismatic — the life of the party — and I wanted to know, where have these people been?”

Adrales’ mother was one of the inspirations for “The Heart Sellers,” Lloyd Suh’s comedy opening Thursday at the Guthrie Theater. Set in 1973, the one-act puts her in the mind, if not the shoes, of her mother when she was a new immigrant in America.

A wry comedy whose name puns on the 1965 Hart-Celler Act that overhauled the immigration system to prioritize skills and family ties while removing limits based on nationality, “Heart” was commissioned by Adrales while she was on staff at the Milwaukee Rep, where it premiered last year.

The play sprung out of conversations that Adrales and Suh had about their mothers’ respective journeys to America — Suh is a child of Korean immigrants who settled in Indiana.

“Every day that I rehearse this play or encounter it, I learn more about my parents,” Adrales said. “It offers a window into their uncertainty and anxiety — the loneliness, fear and isolation that comes with leaving your country and starting anew.”

The action centers on Jane and Luna, two Asian immigrants who meet at a grocery store on Thanksgiving Day 1973. Both 23 and wearing the same Kmart coat while their medical resident husbands labor at work, they strike up a conversation that leads to sharing wine and dreams as they deal with a frozen turkey.

Previously, Adrales had worked on composer Imani Uzuri and playwright Zakiyyah Alexander’s “Girl Shakes Loose” at Penumbra Theatre. With “Heart,” she has reassembled the same creative team and actors who starred in the production last December at the Huntington Theatre in Boston.

For Jenna Agbayani, who plays Luna, her character, like the play, is revelatory.

“I see her as a woman — as a person — with the kind of depth any woman can have despite where she comes from or how she looks,” Agbayani said. “She’s a woman with dreams and she’s learning to take up space.”

Agbayani shares the same heritage as Luna, except the actor’s Filipino parents came to the States in the 1990s to work in the tech field in Jacksonville, Fla., where she was raised. Her parents discouraged the speaking of Tagalog, the main Filipino tongue, at home. But her grandmother imparted Filipino cultural nuggets, and Agbayani uses that spirit as inspiration for her portrayal of Luna.

“Funnily enough, some of [Luna’s] worries about whether her hypothetical daughter will understand how to love because she didn’t grow up in the Philippines — that really resonates with my own grandmother,” Agbayani said. “I can feel Luna and her isolation in the U.S. just because I have the face of my grandma.”

Juyeon Song, the other actor in this two-hander, draws on her own immigrant experience to play Jane. She was born and raised in South Korea, where her parents still live, and graduated from the famed Tisch School at New York University.

“I do understand the hidden truths in families and her [Jane’s] suppressed dreams of becoming a painter or being on a soccer team,” Song said.

In the play, as in real life, immigrants have to deal with whether to simplify their names so that they are not the victims of unintended butchering in their first encounters with strangers. Luna’s proper name is a proper mouthful: Luningning Ignacia Mangahas de la Rosario Bustos.

The name adaptation is one of the things that Song shares with Jane, who took her name from Jane Fonda. Her performance in “Heart” at the Huntington was her American stage debut, and Song used Judy, which is familiar and easier for Americans to pronounce, as her first name. (There’s also another Juyeon Song in the performance field, an older, world-class lyric soprano.)

For Adrales, the “Heart” story comes full circle not just at the personal level. Both her family and Suh’s fled brutal strongmen leaders in Korea and the Philippines, respectively, in the late 1960s to early 1970s. America served as a alternate, inspiring beacon.

“For these two women, their governments at the time couldn’t be trusted and they were running away from that to a new dream,” Adrales said. “So, it’s confusing when they come here and find that what they think they know don’t square with reality.”

Adrales pondered the title and the law some more, zooming out.

“Both Jane and Luna were able to immigrate to the States, but as the two are considering the ramifications of the law, it gets into a larger question about what it really means to immigrate,” Adrales said. “What does it mean to essentially give away your heart? What does it mean to uproot your family and plant yourself in a new country?”

Who: By Lloyd Suh. Directed by May Adrales.

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

When: 7:30 p.m. Tue.-Fri., 1 & 7:30 p.m. Sat., 1 & 7 p.m. Sun. Ends Jan. 25.

Tickets: $29 to $85, 612-377-2224, guthrietheater.org.