Young Jean Lee is one of the most exciting, acclaimed, highly-buzzed young theatremakers coming out of New York City right now. But it’s unclear whether she’s been able to enjoy a minute of it.
“I always start all my shows by asking what is the last show in the world I would ever want to make, and then I force myself to make that play,” she tells the Standard from the seats of the Baryshnikov Arts Centre in New York City.
Of course, the creative process contains moments and discoveries that ultimately justify her decision to leave the world of academia at UC Berkeley and become an experimental playwright. But, at their core, each of the plays she writes and directs is meant to make her feel very, very uncomfortable.
In Lear, Lee deconstructs Shakespeare’s royal tragedy (her all-time favourite play) into an absurd modernist analysis of youth. In We’re Gonna Die, Lee herself took the starring role in a cabaret about death and disease, carefully staged to highlight her lack of acting or singing talent. In Church, the “non-believing daughter of Korean-American evangelicals” presents a side of Christianity that’s earnest, open-minded, humble, and tolerant. And The Shipment, which opens tonight at the Harbourfront Centre as part of the World Stage festival, is the Korean-American writer’s “black identity-politics show.”
Created in 2008, The Shipment was a formative production for Lee’s theatre company, creatively named Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, and cemented her reputation as “one of the best experimental playwrights in America,” according to Time Out New York. But she considers herself to be a mouthpiece for her actors.
“All the content in that show, all the ideas and emotions and things in it, came from the cast members. I just told them to talk about what they would want to say, and I would write in response to that,” she says.
From standup comedians to rap artists to basketball players to cocktail parties, the five-person cast focuses on representations of blackness in entertainment. As African-American entertainers themselves, Lee says the effectiveness of The Shipment lies in the relationship between the actors and their audience.
“That’s the dynamic of the show. [The performers are] totally taking the audience on a journey and they’re setting the guidelines of that,” she says. “It’s designed to make people very aware of the audience around them and how they’re reacting, it’s meant to make people feel self-conscious about when they laugh. The whole point is to feel super, super self-aware about how they view black people.”
While Lee has mostly been praised for her ability to balance cringeworthy introspection with genuinely funny and joyful moments, some of her critics have doubted the contemporary relevance of the racial issues in The Shipment (and of the feminist ones in her most recent work, Untitled Feminist Show). That may say less about her spot-on familiarity with modern social issues than whether these particular pundits liked what they learned about their personal reactions to Lee’s work.
Premiering this past January, Untitled Feminist Show–a wordless series of dance sequences performed by five women of different body types and ethnicities, entirely in the nude–is actually Lee’s most populist project to date.
“I wanted everybody to feel like they could be part of the celebration. I didn’t want to alienate people, I wanted to let them in,” she explains–quite a stretch for an artist that finds comfort in discomfort.
Perhaps she’s beginning to break out of her masochistic shell. But with The Shipment, Toronto will get to experience quintessential Young Jean Lee in all its skin-crawling agony. And we’ll cringe so good.
Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment runs May 9-12 at Harbourfront Centre’s Enwave Theatre.
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Carly Maga is an arts writer for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter: @RadioMaga.
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