c/o New Dramatists
424 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
(212) 757-6960
(212) 265-4738 fax
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 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, a resident artist at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), 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, and in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French). Her play SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN will be published in the September 2007 issue of American Theatre, as well as in a collection of all of her plays to be published by Theatre Communications Group in spring 2008. She is the recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her work has been invited to tour to venues in Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. She will direct her new play THE SHIPMENT at The Kitchen and an adaptation of KING LEAR at Soho Rep. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company (www.youngjeanlee.org) and is the recipient of a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.
CHURCH
Full-length Experimental Comedy, 60 Minutes
1M, 3W
Flexible Set
Young Jean Lee transforms her life-long struggle with Christianity into an exuberant church service. This is a church of celebration, designed to test the expectations of religious and non-religious alike. Come to Church--an uplifting, joyous and inspirational event that may be Lee's most miraculous--or devious--experiment to date.
Workshop: Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2007). Productions: P.S. 122 (2007); the Vienna Festival (2008).
"[Lee's] slyly subversive drama ambushes its audience with an earnest and surprisingly moving Christian church service that might be the most unlikely provocation produced in years."--New York Times
SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN
Full-length Experimental Comedy, 80 Minutes
1M, 5W
Flexible Set
Korean-American Young Jean Lee's worst nightmare is to make a show about Korea called Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven presents her confused, disturbing, and frequently offensive take on her cultural background in all of its romanticized, half-informed, and brutal honesty.
Workshops: CUNY Graduate Center's Prelude '05 Festival (2005); HERE Arts Center (2005, 2006). Productions: HERE Arts Center (2006); the Walker Art Center (2007); the Wexner Center for the Arts (2007); the Andy Warhol Museum (2007); the Vienna Festival (2007); Theaterformen (2007); Zurcher Theaterspektakel (2007); Philadelphia Live Arts Festival (2007); PICA (2007); Rotterdamse Schouwburg (2007); Hebbel Theater (2007); La Villette/Festival D'Automne at Pompidou (2007); Kaiitheater (2008); On the Boards (2008).
"The downtown playwright-director is building a jittery, jagged body of work that resists pat definition--except as emotionally raw dispatches from an angry mind that lacerates itself as much as it does the world."--Time Out New York
PULLMAN, WA
Full-length Experimental Comedy, 60 Minutes
3M or W
No Sets
Three ordinary, awkward characters in street clothes address audience members directly in an earnest, frequently disastrous attempt to show them how to live a better life.
Produced at P.S. 122 (2005). Staged reading (in Slovenian) at Glej Teater in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Published in Slovenian. Published in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French, 2006).
"[Lee's] new work has the deadpan simplicity of the plays of Richard Maxwell and the awkward, secretly suffering angst of a teenage diarist working through an identity crisis. It is an honest [work] that takes itself seriously, and that is refreshing."
--New York Times
THE APPEAL
Full-length Experimental Comedy, 60 Minutes
3M, 1W
Flexible Set
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Dorothy Wordsworth get drunk, hang out, and commiserate in England and the Swiss Alps. An irreverent, historically inaccurate look at the English Romantic poets.
Workshop and production at Soho Rep (2004). Published in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French, 2006) and in New Downtown Now (eds. Mac Wellman and Young Jean Lee, University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
"The Appeal is the happiest literary desecration since Amy Freed's The
Beard of Avon, in which Shakespeare declared, 'I have great
thought-like things within my head.'"--New York Sun.
GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS
Short Experimental Comedy, 40 Minutes
2M, 2W
Flexible Set
The Chinese arch-villain Fu Manchu, with the help of his daughter Fah Lo See, attempts to steal the mask and shield of Genghis Khan from the white couple Terrence and Sheila, which will enable Fu Manchu to bring together all the "Oriental" nations in order to defeat the West. An absurd, provocative take on the "yellow peril" stereotype and Asian-American identity politics.
Productions: Williamstown Theatre Festival (2005); Ontological-Hysteric Theater (2003). Published in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French, 2006).
YAGGOO
Short Comic Monologue
1M
No Sets
A whaler describes his social insecurity around the other men on his whaling ship.
Produced at Little Theater (2003).
THE SINOPHILE
Full-length Experimental Comedy, 60 Minutes
5M, 2W
Flexible Set
The bizarre Korean-American Song family, living in Korea, terrorize a biographer and graduate student who come in search of the household patriarch, the famous Professor Song.