Any writer can tell you the most daunting element of a new project is the selection of subject matter. Deciding what to write terrifies many into never writing at all. But 35-year-old Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee plunges into sticky topics headlong. After deciding on the least comfortable topic to tackle, Lee charges it full-force.
So it comes as no big surprise that this relatively new but increasingly famous playwright's most acclaimed works wrestle with the ever-present issue of race. She first subjected modern Christianity to her fearless and highly theatrical style in her play Church, and then turned her attention to the Asian-American population in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven.
Her most acclaimed work, on tour in the United States right now after a successful run on Off-Broadway, is The Shipment, a darkly humorous look at black identity politics. Nearly every night of the show's New York run, Young Jean Lee sat in the back of the theatre, listening closely for the audience's reaction to her self-directed show. The starkly offensive script and hand-picked cast nearly always evoke reactions along racial lines, offending different ethnicities in turn. Lee remains undecided about her desired reactions to the explosive material.
Unique in design, The Shipment was cast by Lee, who also directed the show, and her creative team before it was written, and essentially designed around the actors. Initially, Lee forces the viewer to confront stereotypes of black performers, especially singing and dancing, originating from minstrel shows. After a brief dance number to throbbing music, a man saunters onstage and speaks in exaggerated "black" dialect in the style of stand-up comedy, detailing what the races think of each other with a bluntness teetering on taboo. After his frank speech, the actors sing the Modest Mouse song "Dark Center of the Universe" in all seriousness to the audience with the house lights up as well as the stage lights. The audience is exposed to the actors, creating a sense of connection for the viewer intended to breed discomfort.
A series of impossibly exaggerated scenes in the life of Omar, a young black boy that dreams of being a rapper, drive the audience to examine further biases. Omar's escapades lead him to powerful drug dealers, drive-by shootings, a "video ho" that asks Omar to "do stuff" to her "booty," and other exceedingly extreme situations. Immediately following Omar's story, the cast is transported to a cocktail party where their stilted speech and catty mannerisms immediately spell white society. This strong juxtaposition forces audiences to examine exactly what white and black sound and look like. The highly stylized acting tempts viewers into the trap of denying those caricatures as valid depictions of ethnic groups, then compelling that same viewer to ask his or herself how the races act in reality, once again testing their views .
Though her writing and direction in and of themselves are very fine work, the greatest feat of The Shipment is the way Young Jean Lee leads audiences to examine their own biases and bigotry. This especially rings true in the supposed "post-racial" America of today. Lee realizes in a truly post-racial America, The Shipment would not be a comedy, but a tragedy. She hopes her show affects people as she originally intended, and in that she says," I know that’s unfair of me because I wrote it to be funny, and the performers are funny, but I feel there is so much in there that people should not laugh at. Part of me would rather have them sit there in silent uneasiness.”
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