When starting a play, I ask myself, 'What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?' Then I force myself to write it. I do this because I've found that the best way to make theater that unsettles and challenges my audience is to do things that make me uncomfortable. My work is all about jolting people out of complacent ways of thinking and making them question their beliefs. And in order to do that to my audience, I need to do it to myself. When I wrote my "Asian-American identity-politics play", SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN (worst title ever), my litmus test for whether a scene was working or not was how badly it made me squirm. The instant I got too comfortable with what I was writing, I would turn everything on its head and send the play spinning in an opposite direction. Similarly, when I wrote CHURCH, which takes the form of a Christian church service, I targeted all of the sermons directly at my non-believing self. Since I have a tendency to shut down the minute anyone brings up religion, I had to keep myself constantly off-balance in order to get past my own defenses and force open my own narrow-minded views. I want to make people hold their breaths in anticipation of what will come next, barely giving them time to recover from one blow before they are reeling from the next. I want to create work that disarms audiences with humor and then excoriates them, pummeling them from unexpected directions until they are left disturbed, exhilarated, and without answers.
Although my basic aesthetic objectives and writing style have remained consistent throughout all of my plays, the structure and content of my work is wildly different from show to show. GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS followed the plot of a terrible B-movie from the 30s called The Mask of Fu Manchu; THE APPEAL was a satire about the English Romantic poets; PULLMAN, WA was a performance piece in which the actors tried to teach the audience how to live; and my current work, THE SHIPMENT is a hip-hop African-American identity-politics show (by far my most uncomfortable show to make yet).
I write my plays as I’m directing them, writing scenes for specific performers and rewriting them in the rehearsal room with the performers on their feet. Every word I write is written to be performed, and everything that ends up in the final script has been worked out directorially through a long rehearsal and production process. While I rely heavily on collaborators for artistic input and feedback, I have a strong driving aesthetic and direct every aspect of a production, from its design to its marketing.
My shows are more like performance events than like regular plays. In a typical play, the show doesn’t really start until the houselights dim and the stage lights come up. For me, a show starts with the marketing. Through marketing, I start to play with audience expectation and set people up for the experience they’re going to undergo. For example, for the postcard for SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN, I commissioned a colorful, cheerfully racist painting depicting slant-eyed Chinamen engaging in ludicrously stereotypical activities on a landscape that included both the Great Wall of China and Mount Fuji. The description on the back of the postcard read, “SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN: A show about white people in love.” So a lot of people arrived at the theater already disturbed and disoriented. Once they had their tickets, they were herded into a cramped area behind the set and made to wait in an aggressively Asian installation (which we nicknamed the “Asian Wonderland”) that consisted of an elaborate dragon mural, multicolored Chinese lanterns, and the sounds of a Chinese flute and trickling water. When the house opened, the music and lanterns died out and the audience walked down gravel paths into a dead-silent house, where they found themselves facing a brightly lit, plain plywood box of a set without anything Asian about it. As soon as everyone was seated and had begun talking again, all the lights cut out completely without any announcement or warning (this is one of my favorite tricks for knocking people off-balance), causing people to cry out in surprise and scramble for their cell phones. Then, in the darkness, they heard a recording of my friends and I setting up and practicing to make a video of me getting hit in the face. The audience typically laughed during this part and waited for the video to appear so that they could see what they were hearing. Finally, the video came on of me getting hit in the face repeatedly and crying, and it was horrible and traumatic for them to watch (you can see the video on my myspace page). As the video played, some people determined to leave the theater as soon as it was over (I know because they told me). But then the lights came up on a cute Korean-American girl who gave a twisted comic monologue that made everyone laugh, and even the people who had wanted to leave ended up getting sucked into the show’s roller-coaster ride. Not all of my shows have as elaborate a set-up as SONGS did, but everything from the marketing to the pre-show lights is always calculated to keep the audience off-balance. In this respect, I’ve been as influenced by artists such as Andy Kaufman as I’ve been by other playwrights.
Young Jean Lee was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley’s English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before dropping out and moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at the Public Theater (CHURCH), P.S. 122 (CHURCH; Pullman, WA), HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), Soho Rep (The Appeal), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals). She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now, an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself, Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French), American Theatre magazine (September 2007), and will soon be published in a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group). She is the recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and NYSCA. Her work has been invited to tour to venues in Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Toulouse, Salamanca, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. She will direct her new play The Shipment at the Wexner Center from October 30-November 2, 2008 and at The Kitchen from January 8-24, 2009. She will present an adaptation of King Lear at Soho Rep in January 2010 and has been commissioned to write a new musical for Playwrights Horizons (with music by Mike Doughty). She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company (www.youngjeanlee.org) and is the recipient of the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel and a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.
YJL--so sorry to hear why you couldn't come to lunch, but I'm sure there will be many more chances to connect, so don't worry.
We went to Church that night, and were thrilled by it's generosity, passion, and sincerity. An amazing play by an amazing voice. I truly hope we'll be able to get you to Roanoke some summer very soon.
I went to the New Dramatists to get a monologue and saw your play there and cracked up at this line: "You are obsessed with saving small sums of money" HA HA HA HA HA!
As a human with admittedly questionable taste, a play attendance history which could undoubtedly be rivaled by that of the average 9-year-old, and an education that was terribly (terribly) public...well...I don't pretend to know 'good theater' from Eve.
That said, Church blew me away.
Do us all a favor and keep writing the good write, YJ.
