Young Jean Lee Theater Co. & Fusebox Festival

Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company will perform at The Rollins Theatre at The Long Center.  This is co-presented by Women & Their Work, Pro Arts Collective – BAM Festival and The Fusebox Festival.  Tickets are $22 each at the door and online here.

Sure to be one of the most talked about events of the Fusebox Festival, don’t miss The Shipment, performed by New York’s Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company. Glowingly reviewed by the New York Times and The New Yorker, The Shipment was also named: One of the 10 Best Theater Events of the Year by Time Out New York.

Combing through the images of African-Americans that dominate the media, Young Jean Lee wields sharp, offbeat humor to point up the clichés, distortions and absurdities and turns the wearily familiar — a foul-mouthed stand-up comic, a drug dealer, a would-be rapper — into loopy, arch cartoons. Described by the New York Times as a “subversive, seriously funny new theater piece,” The Shipment is a must see.

Cultural images of black America are tweaked, pulled and twisted like Silly Putty in this subversive, seriously funny new theater piece by the adventurous playwright Young Jean Lee. Ms. Lee, who is Korean-American, consciously set herself the uncomfortable task of creating what she calls a “black identity-politics show.”

Sometimes sly and subtle, sometimes as blunt as a poke in the eye. . . combing through the images of African- Americans that dominate the media, Ms. Lee wields sharp, offbeat humor to point up the clichés, distortions and absurdities, turning the wearily familiar into loopy, arch cartoons. Ms. Lee sets you thinking about how we unconsciously process experience — at the theater, or in life — through the filter of racial perspective, and how hard it can be to see the world truly in something other than black and white.
— Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

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, The New Yorker

Written and directed by Young Jean Lee. With ensemble cast. 1hr 30mins. Commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts (World Premiere) and The Kitchen (NYC Premiere).  Women & Their Work is a NPN Partner of the National Performance Network (NPN).  This project is made possible in part by support form the NPN Performance Residency Program.  Major contributors include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).  For more information:  www.npnweb.org.