When writing “Straight White Men,” Lee had to find a way to be herself and not herself. Photograph by Zach Gross

A musty late-spring evening in Manhattan, 2012. The voluble and irrepressible playwright and director Young Jean Lee swivelled in her seat to take in the audience. The Korean-born Lee, who is now forty and has made a considerable name for herself on the downtown theatre scene, was far from her professional home. She was, in fact, on Broadway, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, on West Forty-eighth Street, waiting for a performance of Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning hit “Clybourne Park” to begin. Looking over all the middle-aged, suit-jacketed men and their well-heeled lady companions around her, Lee sort of shivered and said, “But everyone’s so old.” Although Norris’s play about convention, class, and race touched on themes that Lee had broken down and pieced back together at odd angles in her own work, his relatively traditional naturalism was a far cry from her irreverent, essayistic, collagist approach to storytelling, which makes her, for a range of theatre critics and audiences, a troubling, necessary presence.

In her feminist-minded works, in which characters sometimes talk more to the audience than they do to one another, Lee had built drama around racially driven self-hatred, the naked body, and patriarchy, among other things. Now she wanted to write a different kind of play: a naturalistic work like Norris’s, on the subject of straight white men. In short, she wanted to create art about something that she did not entirely understand in a genre that she hadn’t fully explored. (The result, “Straight White Men,” premièred at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, in April, and will make its New York début at the Public in November.)

Walking through the neon delirium of Times Square after “Clybourne Park,” which she pronounced “good, in terms of, you know, being a play, with a beginning and end and all,” Lee explained, “I’ve found that the only way to make theatre that gets the audience thinking is when I feel uncomfortable making it.” She paused in front of Lace, a cavernous “gentleman’s club” on Seventh Avenue. “A titty bar!” she exclaimed loudly. The burly, bald bouncer stationed out front looked down at the source of all the noise—a hundred and twenty pounds, asymmetrical haircut—and said nothing. “A titty bar,” Lee said again. “If I’m gonna be a straight white man, I’m definitely going to have to go to a titty bar.”

Lee’s imagination is associative. Her work is, for the most part, fuelled by memories and the associations they inspire. While those memories are often painful, they are part of the solid ground her characters stand on. And yet, for a long time, Lee didn’t feel as if she were on solid ground herself. Her parents, James and Inn-Soo Lee, were born into a turbulent, divided Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1976, when Lee was two years old, so that James could earn a doctorate in chemical engineering. Growing up in the small town of Pullman, Washington, Lee, unlike her father, was an indifferent student. Not engaging in school was, perhaps, her way of not dealing with the casual and not so casual racism that was directed her way by the predominantly white students there: if she didn’t excel, she wouldn’t risk standing out, being seen. But, at the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in English, she worked with the Shakespeare scholars Stephen Greenblatt and Stephen Booth, who recognized her gifts. As a graduate student at Berkeley, Lee began a dissertation on “King Lear.”

Four years into the project, she got married. She was twenty-six and was beginning to feel undernourished in the academy—a strange thing for the daughter of immigrants to admit, even to herself. She felt frustrated, too, in her marriage. One day, her therapist asked her to say, off the top of her head, what she wanted to do with her life, and Lee replied, “I want to be a playwright.” “It was just like saying that I wanted to be a clown or a skunk,” she told the director Richard Maxwell, in a 2008 interview. Lee’s therapist asked her to try to recall when that dream had been planted. “And all of a sudden,” she said, “I remembered that in this tiny little town in eastern Washington where I grew up we had this horrible summer-stock theatre, where they did musicals like ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.’ . . . I remember being a little kid and going to see these plays and just having that be the best, most magical experience of my entire life.”

In 2000, Lee’s husband enrolled in Yale Law School, and they moved to New Haven. Feeling her way toward her new ambition, Lee looked up all the playwrights who were teaching at the Yale School of Drama, read their work, then contacted the one whose writing she considered the weirdest—Jeffrey M. Jones. Jones pointed her to the experimental theatre space PS122, in the East Village, to the Wooster Group, and to the work of Richard Foreman and Richard Maxwell. Watching these and other artists, Lee knew that she wanted not only to write her own plays but also to direct them—all in a bid to control her own vision. But what was that?

In 2002, she started in Mac Wellman’s prestigious Master of Fine Arts playwriting program at Brooklyn College. There she learned some valuable lessons. Her first semester, she had a script due, and she found herself desperate to write something as “cool” as the works she admired by Maxwell and Foreman, but was unable to produce anything that she thought was strong. When she explained her plight to Wellman, he suggested that, instead, she write a script that she didn’t want to write. So Lee asked herself, “What’s the worst possible play I could write—the last kind of play I would ever think about writing?” The least cool thing she could come up with was a play about the Romantic poets, whom she had always disliked. “It was such a pretentious, horrible idea for a play,” she said. “The Appeal” (2004), a brief, intense comedic drama, is divided into glistening, shard-sharp scenes in which Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Byron argue about writing and the imagination and furniture, and Dorothy Wordsworth chastises her brother (“You’re a total and complete fucking moron”) for not understanding anything other than language or himself. While the piece has echoes of Maxwell in its flatness of speech, the themes are Lee’s own. She calls “The Appeal” evidence of “my shame”—proof of her failure to write a play like those of her admired elders. Nevertheless, the cool people loved the play, and it was mounted at the Soho Rep in 2004, where it attracted attention not only for its script but for Lee’s skeptical but feeling directorial eye.

Two years later, Lee, who had separated from her husband, produced her first masterpiece, “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven,” which features four women, named Korean 1, Korean 2, Korean 3, and Korean-American. (A straight couple called White Person 1 and White Person 2 complete the cast.) As the play begins, the stage goes black and the audience hears, in the darkness, Lee and others planning how she will be slapped in the face for a video. After each resounding slap, Lee analyzes its impact; cruelty, like acting, can be rehearsed. Soon, the critical distance in her voice as she evaluates each slap and its effect as a theatrical device starts to make us feel worried, tense. Lights up on Korean-American:

“We’re running a little behind, but we’d be happy to have our anesthesiologist put you under for a few hours, until the doctor is ready to see you.” Facebook

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