When most people think of Celine Song, they likely think of her breakthrough hit film Past Lives. The movie, an achingly tender chronicle of love and migration, which mirrors Song’s own life, has garnered an almost cult–following—in addition to glowing reviews and two Oscar nominations. Following on the heels of this success, Song recently teamed up with production studio A24 once again to write and direct Materialists, a romance starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans. However, what seems like overnight directorial success doesn’t come out of nowhere. Long before cementing herself as an acclaimed movie director, Song first made her way as a playwright. Beyond the big screen, her writing credits span the theaters of Off–Broadway and even The Sims 4.
Earning her Master of Fine Arts in Playwriting from Columbia University in 2014, Song has spent plenty of time honing her craft. After graduating, she wrote and developed several plays, including the surrealist drama Family and the playful romance Tom & Eliza. In Tom & Eliza, Song toggles with depictions of mundane middle–class life, using biting humor to expose the absurdities of falling in and out of love. Meanwhile, far from mundanity, Family threads together fairy–tale madness and twisted horror to craft a dark dive into familial dysfunction, violence, and isolation. In her play The Feast, Song takes another stab at portraying apocalyptic life, placing her characters in a meatless world—one that throws audiences into an uncanny exploration of science and hunger.
Beyond the stage and screen, Song has also dabbled in a less conventional artistic medium—The Sims 4. As live performance became impossible during the COVID–19 pandemic, Song conceptualized an innovative virtual reenactment of Anton Chekohv’s play The Seagull within the popular video game. Broadcasted on a live Twitch stream as Song controlled a “cast” of online avatars, the performance captured the kind of irreverent humor that characterized pandemic–era adaptations of normal life. However, while a video game portrayal of a classic Russian melodrama might seem ridiculous, Song explained that her choice to use The Sims 4 as a canvas was highly intentional.
“The Sims is a very interesting video game, because it attempts to simulate human life as it exists, the mundanity and all,” Song said in an interview with Polygon. “In The Sims, we as players are both Gods and voyeurs. That seemed to closely resemble the experience of writing and watching a play as a playwright, but without the living, breathing humans as the actors.”
Among the most popular of Song’s (real life) plays is Endlings, which opened at New York Theatre Workshop in 2020. The play bridges two seemingly disparate worlds—that of three Korean haenyeo and that of a Manhattan playwright. In the island half of the narrative, Song memorializes the history of Korea’s “sea women”—female free divers who have for centuries made a living by harvesting seafood from the ocean. The Manhattan half loops an extratextual bend into the story.
In semi–autobiographical fashion, Endlings features a playwright intended to resemble Song—a Korean–Canadian who immigrated twice before pursuing her aspirations in New York. The narrative catches the protagonist, Ha Young, in a metafictional crisis, revealing how her choice to portray the lives of the haenyeo aimed to appease the work’s white sponsors. The detour leads her to grapple with the exploration and commodification of artistic identity—a pointed commentary on whiteness, representation, and authenticity in theater.
“The non–Asian gaze on an Asian body is full of hateful, poorly informed stereotypes thanks to a severe lack of authentic Asian representation in Western media. I wanted the world around me to forget that I was an Asian, because it hurt too much to be seen,” Song wrote in an article for Hedgerow Theatre company. “So I aligned myself with whiteness and patriarchy, both as a person and as an artist.”
This alignment led Song to write what she describes as “white plays”—nondescript works which often ignore the lines of nationality, race, and location in order to feel relevant to white audiences. In Endlings, Ha Young finds herself in a similar situation. Until her work about the haenyeo, Ha Young had avoided writing about her Korean identity in favor of plays about white protagonists and their issues. Given the chance to depict her heritage in the theater, she often finds herself navigating a delicate tension between honoring her history and exoticising it for white audiences. “I don’t want to sell my skin for theater,” Ha Young states.
Through Ha Young, Song asks questions about identity—both on how it is formed as well as fractured. She returns to them again in Past Lives. Written in a similarly autobiographical fashion, the film is based around Song’s own experiences reconnecting with a former love from Korea after having married her husband, whom she met in America. Not quite a romance, the movie is instead a bittersweet unfolding of unborn realities, a depiction of the translation act that the protagonist, Nora, navigates between the two halves of her life, culture, and identity.
Spanning twenty–four years, the film takes root in Korea, beginning with the friendship of twelve year–old classmates Hae Sung and Na Young. After Na Young’s family immigrates to Canada, the pair lose contact with each other. Twelve years later, Hae Sung finds Na Young—now Nora—online. The two connect virtually for a brief period of time, through grainy video calls that stretch from Hae Sung’s home in Seoul to Nora’s new home in New York City. They keep in touch this way until Nora ends things, proclaiming a determination to focus on her life and ambitions in America, unmooring herself from the life in Korea she has given up. After another twelve years pass, Hae Sung travels to New York to see Nora, who is now married to a man named Arthur.
One of the most striking scenes of Past Lives illustrates the real–life moment which inspired Song to create the film. At a dimly lit bar sits Nora, with Hae Sung on one side and Arthur on the other. Nora acts as a tether between the two, switching between Korean conversation with Hae Sung and English with Arthur. To her former sweetheart, she is one person, but to her husband, another. The slow, ruminative unfurling of the scene captures what acts as a crux for the film: the quietly painful idea of “what if”—what is lost as we move from one choice to another, one country to another, one life to the next.
Now, Song has made waves again with the movie Materialists, a romantic comedy which draws on her personal experience as a matchmaker. Starring Dakota Johnson as a highly–logical matchmaker, the film follows her character, Lucy, as she navigates the potential for romantic connection between a wealthy businessman (Pedro Pascal) and her ex–boyfriend, a financially struggling actor (Chris Evans). With Materialists, Song continues to ask questions—this time about love, worth, and what truly makes a relationship work. It’s been advertised as a romantic comedy, yes, but one that leans into complexity rather than fantasy, continuing Song’s commitment to telling stories that are as incisive as they are entertaining.
