Young Jean Lee

'Post-black' refers to an emerging trend within black arts to find new and multiple expressions of blackness, unburdened by the social and cultural expectations of blackness of the past and moving beyond the conventional binary of black and white. Reflecting this multiplicity of perspectives, the plays in this collection explode the traditional ways of representing black families on the American stage, and create new means to consider the interplay of race, with questions of class, gender, and sexuality. They engage and critique current definitions of black and African-American identity, as well as previous limitations placed on what constitutes blackness and black theatre. Written by the emerging stars of American theatre such as Eisa Davis and Marcus Gardley, the plays explore themes as varied as family and individuality, alienation and gentrification, and reconciliation and belonging. They demonstrate a wide-range of formal and structural innovations for the American theatre, and reflect the important ways in which contemporary playwrights are expanding the American dramatic canon with new and diverse means of representation. Edited by two leading US scholars in black drama, Harry J. Elam Jr (Stanford) and Douglas A. Jones Jr (Princeton), this cutting edge anthology gathers together some of the most exciting new American plays, selected by a rigorous academic backbone and explored in depth by supporting critical material.

Two compassionately subversive plays about identity, by Young Jean Lee, a Korean American playwright whose work is groundbreaking, humorous and often thrillingly transgressive. In Straight White Men, it's Christmas Eve, and Ed has gathered his three adult sons to celebrate with matching pyjamas, trash-talking, and Chinese takeaway. But when a question they can't answer interrupts their seasonal cheer, they are forced to confront their own identities. Raucous, surprising and fearless, Straight White Men takes an outside look at the traditional father/son narrative, shedding new light on a story we think we know all too well. It had its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2021, following US productions including a Broadway run that made Lee the first Asian-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. In Untitled Feminist Show, six charismatic stars of the theatre, dance, cabaret and burlesque worlds come together in an exhilaratingly irreverent, nearly wordless celebration of a fluid and limitless sense of identity. Untitled Feminist Show isn't a show about feminism – it is a feminist show. It premiered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2012 before transferring to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City. 'Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation' New York Times

"Ms. Lee's fascinating play . . . goes far beyond cheap satire, ultimately becoming a compassionate and stimulating exploration of one man's existential crisis . . . She proves unexpectedly adept at strict naturalism . . . A] mournful and inquisitive play." "New York Times""She sacrifices nothing; bodies, voices, jokes, food, tragedy, cities are all artistic fodder, as are her various selves and the mirthful, bloody life of her imagination." "New Yorker"Provocative playwright Young Jean Lee lends her shrewd perspective to this atypical take on the family drama. A father and his three sons unite and unravel, both aware of and undone by privilege and its pressure. When inherent social expectation conflicts with a desire to remain stagnant, the resulting identity confusion is new territory for the tightknit family. Strikingly observant and curiously drawn, Lee departs from her experimental style to create a naturalistic observation of the most socially unobstructed of our species, the straight white male. Young Jean Lee has been hailed as "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by "Time Out New York." She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her other plays include "We're Gonna Die," "Untitled Feminist Show," "The Shipment," "Lear "and "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven." Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award."

The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays is an anthology of six outstanding plays from some of the most exciting playwrights currently receiving critical acclaim in the States. It showcases work produced at a number of the leading theatres during the last decade and charts something of the extraordinary range of current playwriting in America. It will be invaluable not only to readers and theatergoers in the U. S., but to those around the world seeking out new American plays and an insight into how U. S. playwrights are engaging with their current social and political environment. There is a rich collection of distinctive, diverse voices at work in the contemporary American theatre and this brings together six of the best, with work by David Adjmi, Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Katori Hall, Christopher Shinn and Dan LeFranc. The featured plays range from the intimate to the epic, the personal to the national and taken together explore a variety of cultural perspectives on life in America. The first play, David Adjmi's Stunning, is an excavation of ruptured identity set in modern day Midwood, Brooklyn, in the heart of the insular Syrian-Jewish community; Marcus Gardley's lyrical epic The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with the migration of Black Seminoles, is set in mid-1800s Oklahoma and speaks directly to modern spirituality, relocation and cultural history; Young Jean Lee's Pullman, WA deals with self-hatred and the self-help culture in her formally inventive three-character play; Katori Hall's Hurt Village uses the real housing project of "Hurt Village" as a potent allegory for urban neglect set against the backdrop of the Iraq war; Christopher Shinn's Dying City melds the personal and political in a theatrical crucible that cracks open our response to 9/11 and Abu Graib, and finally Dan LeFranc's The Big Meal, an inter-generational play spanning eighty years, is set in the mid-west in a generic restaurant and considers family legacy and how some of the smallest events in life turn out to be the most significant.

"Sly, weird, and thoroughly winning . . . Bracing, funny, and, yes, consoling."--"The New York Times""Young Jean Lee will give you whiplash. Her ability to stake out aesthetic territory and then abruptly abandon it makes her unpredictable; her tendency to excel at each new genre makes her terrifying. In the enormously touching cabaret-style "We're Gonna Die," Lee jettisons everything that has armored this "au courant" young playwright against the world. . . . Lee purchases our hearts with her bravery's own coin."--"Time Out New York"Inspired by her personal experiences with despair and loneliness, the Obie Award-winning playwright-provocateur and her band Future Wife create a life-affirming show that anyone can perform, about the one thing everyone has in common: we're all gonna die. Each book includes a CD of all six songs and eight monologues performed by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Adam Horowitz, and others. Young Jean Lee has been hailed as "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by "Time Out New York." She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her other plays include "The Shipment," "Lear," and "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven." Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award.

The Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays is an anthology of six outstanding plays from some of the most exciting playwrights currently receiving critical acclaim in the States. It showcases work produced at a number of the leading theatres during the last decade and charts something of the extraordinary range of current playwriting in America. It will be invaluable not only to readers and theatergoers in the U. S., but to those around the world seeking out new American plays and an insight into how U. S. playwrights are engaging with their current social and political environment. There is a rich collection of distinctive, diverse voices at work in the contemporary American theatre and this brings together six of the best, with work by David Adjmi, Marcus Gardley, Young Jean Lee, Katori Hall, Christopher Shinn and Dan LeFranc. The featured plays range from the intimate to the epic, the personal to the national and taken together explore a variety of cultural perspectives on life in America. The first play, David Adjmi's Stunning, is an excavation of ruptured identity set in modern day Midwood, Brooklyn, in the heart of the insular Syrian-Jewish community; Marcus Gardley's lyrical epic The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry deals with the migration of Black Seminoles, is set in mid-1800s Oklahoma and speaks directly to modern spirituality, relocation and cultural history; Young Jean Lee's Pullman, WA deals with self-hatred and the self-help culture in her formally inventive three-character play; Katori Hall's Hurt Village uses the real housing project of "Hurt Village" as a potent allegory for urban neglect set against the backdrop of the Iraq war; Christopher Shinn's Dying City melds the personal and political in a theatrical crucible that cracks open our response to 9/11 and Abu Graib, and finally Dan LeFranc's The Big Meal, an inter-generational play spanning eighty years, is set in the mid-west in a generic restaurant and considers family legacy and how some of the smallest events in life turn out to be the most significant.

At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleido-scopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations. Though disparate in subject matter and style, with characters ranging from a sushi chef to a soldier and settings from a taxicab to a live television broadcast, these highly original plays share a commitment to formal experimentation that places them beyond the psychological clichés of the majority and the cold condescension of postmodernism. The anthology includes Interim by Barbara Cassidy; Tragedy: a tragedy by Will Eno; Nine Come by Elana Greenfield; Shufu-Sachiko and Enoshima Island by Madelyn Kent; The Appeal by Young Jean Lee; The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes; Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan; Apparition, an uneasy play of the underknown by Anne Washburn; Demon Baby by Erin Courtney. Mac Wellman is the author of numerous plays and the recipient of three Obie awards, most recently in 2003 for lifetime achievement. He is professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director, and member of the Obie award-winning company 13P. Jeffrey M. Jones is a playwright and curator of the Obie award-winning Little Theater at Tonic in New York.