Young Jean Lee
Список книг автора Young Jean LeeSongs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays
“Bold, unguarded work . . . that resists pat definition. [Young Jean] Lee has penned profane lampoons of motivational bromides ( Pullman, WA ) and the Romantic poets ( The Appeal ). Now she piles her deconstructive scorn upon ethnic stereotypes in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , a sweet-and-sour parade of Asian minstrelsy.”— Time Out New York “A perverse, provocative, and very funny festival of racism . . . Songs offers not only chauvinistic monologues and ass-slapping Korean dances, but also a rigorous exploration of art-making and its associated terrors.”— The Village Voice “Have you ever noticed how most Asian Americans are slightly brain-damaged from having grown up with Asian parents?” begins the Korean American protagonist of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , the singular work of Young Jean Lee, whose plays are like nothing you have ever seen or read. This is the first collection by the downtown writer-director, whose explorations of stereotypes of race, gender, and religion are unflinching—and seat-squirming funny. Also includes Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals ; The Appeal ; Pullman, WA ; Church ; and Yaggoo . Young Jean Lee was born in Korea and moved to the United States at age two. She grew up in Pullman, Washington, and attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also studied Shakespeare in the English PhD program before moving to New York. She is the founder of the Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, where she directs her own work, and has toured internationally in Vienna, Hanover, Berlin, Switzerland, Brussels, Norway, France, and Rotterdam; and across the United States in Portland, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. She is the recipient of a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.
The Shipment and Lear
“A subversive, seriously funny new theater piece by the adventurous playwright Young Jean Lee. . . . Ms. Lee does not shy away from prodding the audience’s racial sensitivities—or insensitivities—in a style that is sometimes sly and subtle, sometimes as blunt as a poke in the eye.”—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times “Lee is a facetious provocateur; she does whatever she can to get under our skins—with laughs and with raw, brutal talk . . . [and with] so ingenious a twist, such a radical bit of theatrical smoke and mirrors, that we are forced to confront our own preconceived notions of race.”—Hilton Als, The New Yorker With The Shipment , her latest work taking on identity politics, Young Jean Lee “confirms herself as one of the best experimental playwrights in America” ( Time Out New York ). The Korean American theater artist has taken on cultural images of black America, in a play that begins with sketches of African American clichés—an angry, foul-mouthed comedian; an aspiring young rapper who ends up in prison—and ends with a seemingly naturalistic parlor comedy, which slyly reveals the larger game Lee is playing, leaving us to consider the many ways that we see the world through a racial lens. Young Jean Lee is a playwright, director, and artistic director of her own OBIE Award-winning theater company, which as been producing her plays since 2003. Her other works include Songs of Dragons Flying to Heaven , Church , The Appeal , and Pullman, WA , and they have been produced across the country and internationally.
Straight White Men / Untitled Feminist Show
“Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show is one of the more moving and imagina­tive works I have ever seen on the American stage…what makes it so transcendent is its delicious ability to alternate the pain of being different with a sense of humor about lives not lived among the status quo.” —Hilton Als, New Yorker “The twisty, turbulent, argumentative work of Young Jean Lee…will make you flinch, but it’s hard to look away…Lee has always been interested in exposing how we perform our identities. But in Straight White Men , she drills into something more core. Shuck off, subvert, cleave to your gender or race all you like, but a universal horror of weakness remains—a collective orientation toward status, power, control.” —Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Who said the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak? Both are pretty damn fierce in director Young Jean Lee’s all-nude dance suite cheekily (but purposefully) called Untitled Feminist Show . In a scant (and scantily clad) hour, Lee and her gutsy danc­ers try on a dizzying variety of modes and masks to shake up gender norms.” —David Cote, Time Out New York “ Straight White Men might be the most subversive thing that Young Jean Lee, one of American theater’s most keenly seditious practitioners, has ever done.” —Alexis Soloski, Guardian “Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times Young Jean Lee , with Straight White Men , became the first Asian-American woman to have her play produced on Broadway. She has directed her work in more than thirty cities around the world, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a PEN Literary Award.