The Shipment
“Lee is a facetious provocateur; that is, she does whatever she can to get under our skin—with laughs and with raw, brutal talk…Lee makes her audience walk a knife’s edge of race and meaning. How does blackness sound? And how have we been conditioned to hear black speech?...This is so ingenious a twist, such a radical bit of theatrical smoke and mirrors, that, in rethinking everything that has come before…we are forced to confront our own preconceived notions of race. And to agree with Lee that we may not live long enough to purge ourselves of them.” –Hilton Als, New Yorker
“[The Shipment explores] just how much skin color continues to frame the way we see each other—even in a post-race, Barack Obama-electing America. It’s an early example of what will hopefully be an avalanche of smart, fearless work that brings the same fresh feel to the artistic conversation about race that is said to imbue today’s politics." -Kai Wright, The Root
“The Shipment is f***ing brilliant.” –B.B. Yates, Exeunt Magazine
LEAR
“In LEAR, Young Jean Lee’s self-described ‘inaccurate distortion’ of the classic, she banishes the title monarch and Gloucester to the wings and focuses on the younger generation…The absurdist, meta-Shakespearean results are by turns irreverent, grotesque and morally harrowing…Lee is one of the most vital, rewarding playwrights to arrive on the scene in the past decade. LEAR has power and ought to endure.” –David Cote, TimeOut New York
“Lee uses King Lear and some beautifully unconventional additions to flesh out Shakespeare’s themes of loneliness, mortality and filial responsibility in gratifying and moving depth.” –Sam Thielman, Variety
“Young Jean’s LEAR is Shakespeare’s rotated in four-dimensional space to reveal what is lost in most productions (ghastly, sentimental parodies for the most part—Bard shibboleths): the cold, hard claims of nothingness—the implacable something/nothing out of which we all come, and into which we vanish without a trace. The simple power of the work is terrific, often sardonic, always relentless; LEAR is certainly Lee’s best work yet.” –Mac Wellman
The Shipment
“Lee is a facetious provocateur; that is, she does whatever she can to get under our skin—with laughs and with raw, brutal talk…Lee makes her audience walk a knife’s edge of race and meaning. How does blackness sound? And how have we been conditioned to hear black speech?...This is so ingenious a twist, such a radical bit of theatrical smoke and mirrors, that, in rethinking everything that has come before…we are forced to confront our own preconceived notions of race. And to agree with Lee that we may not live long enough to purge ourselves of them.” –Hilton Als, New Yorker
“[The Shipment explores] just how much skin color continues to frame the way we see each other—even in a post-race, Barack Obama-electing America. It’s an early example of what will hopefully be an avalanche of smart, fearless work that brings the same fresh feel to the artistic conversation about race that is said to imbue today’s politics." -Kai Wright, The Root
“The Shipment is f***ing brilliant.” –B.B. Yates, Exeunt Magazine
LEAR
“In LEAR, Young Jean Lee’s self-described ‘inaccurate distortion’ of the classic, she banishes the title monarch and Gloucester to the wings and focuses on the younger generation…The absurdist, meta-Shakespearean results are by turns irreverent, grotesque and morally harrowing…Lee is one of the most vital, rewarding playwrights to arrive on the scene in the past decade. LEAR has power and ought to endure.” –David Cote, TimeOut New York
“Lee uses King Lear and some beautifully unconventional additions to flesh out Shakespeare’s themes of loneliness, mortality and filial responsibility in gratifying and moving depth.” –Sam Thielman, Variety
“Young Jean’s LEAR is Shakespeare’s rotated in four-dimensional space to reveal what is lost in most productions (ghastly, sentimental parodies for the most part—Bard shibboleths): the cold, hard claims of nothingness—the implacable something/nothing out of which we all come, and into which we vanish without a trace. The simple power of the work is terrific, often sardonic, always relentless; LEAR is certainly Lee’s best work yet.” –Mac Wellman
