Young Jean Lee's Theater Company

THE SHIPMENT

Young Jean Lee challenged herself, as a Korean American, to create a politically engaged theater piece about black American identity. Subversive, sharp, and irreverent, THE SHIPMENT raises pointed questions about ethnic appropriation and race relations, distorts stereotypes, and unsettles the audience’s certainties. Young Jean Lee exposes the racial filter through which we unconsciously perceive reality, and beneath the humor, reveals how difficult it is to see the world in terms other than black and white.

Born in Korea in 1974, Young Jean Lee moved to the US when she was two. She received her BA at UC Berkeley and studied Shakespeare for six years in a PhD program before moving to New York to become a playwright. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College and is the recipient of the 2007 Zurich Theatre Festival Patronage Prize and a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award. Her plays have toured worldwide and have been published in New Downtown Now (2006) and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (2009).

This work is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network's Performance Residency Program. Major contributors to the NPN include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency), Altria, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. www.npnweb.org. THE SHIPMENT is co-commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts and The Kitchen. Additional support provided by the Greenwall Foundation, Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation.

www.youngjeanlee.org

She offers the pleasure of brazen theatrical inventiveness. The New Yorker