Young Jean Lee: Contemporary Visionary
“My enemy is complacency. I hate it in myself and I hate it in general. I think it leads to really bad things happening, where everything in your world just validates your beliefs, so you’re constantly being stroked and told that you’re right and you never have to question any of your beliefs or ideas. I think that’s so dangerous. I feel like if you go to see a work of theater and it just reinforces all of your pre-existing beliefs and you get exactly what you’re expecting—I don’t think that’s good for people. I’ve never stated it in such a moralistic way, but I guess I do feel moralistic about it because, on principle, I think it’s good to ask questions, to have things split apart and become fragmented and contradictory.” – Young Jean Lee (quoted in L Magazine)
Young Jean Lee was born in 1974 in South Korea;her parents and she emigrated to America when she was two. Lee grew up in Pullman, Washington state. She became interested in studying Shakespeare when she was first introduced to the playwright from a literature perspective in high school. She attended UC Berkeley as an undergraduate English major, focusing her studies heavily on Shakespeare, and then entered UC Berkeley’s English PhD program immediately upon graduation. In her doctoral program, she studied with and assisted some of the best living Shakespeare scholars in the country: Stephen Greenblatt (editor of The Norton Shakespeare), Janet Adelmann, and Stephen Booth. Lee’s dissertation topic ended up being Shakespeare’s King Lear. Specifically, she was studying the differences between Shakespeare’s take on the story of Lear and the anonymous play that served as Shakespeare’s source material. Specifically, Lee found herself fascinated by Shakespeare’s treatment of his source material’s form. While the source material was very organized and well-made, Shakespeare’s version was wilder, more complicated, larger in its scope and ambition and left its audience with more questions than answers. It was the kind of theatre that Young Jean Lee had begun to find herself drawn to.
So, how did this California-based student of Shakespeare become a Brooklyn-based play maker? In 2002, Lee was finishing her dissertation in New Haven, CT when the growing realization that she that she hated academia sent her to a therapist who asked her what she really wanted to do with her life. Lee answered “I want to be a playwright.” She was surprised; she had only ever written avocationally and had never considered making it her career. Nonetheless, she wrote to Yale playwright Jeffrey M. Jones and asked if he would meet with her. He did, and suggested that she move to New York and explore the Downtown theatre scene, telling her seek out the luminaries of Downtown. She moved to the city immediately, withdrew from UC Berkeley, and enrolled in seminal experimental playwright Mac Wellman’s MFA in Playwriting program at Brooklyn College and worked as an administrative assistant at Soho Rep (a company that would someday produce her work) and an intern for Radiohole (a collective of which Lee is now a member).
Lee cites her opportunity to watch Radiohole work as crucial to the development of her aesthetic. Inspired by the influential Wooster Group collective, Radiohole’s model is completely collaborative; every artist does everything from acting to producing to directing. As a result, their work felt alive and not stale. Already instinctively a writer, Lee learned to direct solely from watching Radiohole.
In 2003, Lee founded Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company and began to self produce work which eventually led to her first commission from Soho Rep in 2004, The Appeal. One can see some of the origins of Lear in this earlier play: 19th-century poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s sister, and Byron get very drunk together and speak in contemporary language in period costume. Lee had written the play before rehearsals began, but recalls a formative experience in which she was stuck on a revision and experimented with creating work while in rehearsal. She was hooked.
Now, Lee exclusively casts actors first before writing the play. She simply looks for the best actors she can find, interested in charismatic, powerful performers who are highly intelligent and then writes plays partly based on who those actors are as people and what they can do as actors. The amount of material she writes directly from her actors varies, but her processes are always highly collaborative. Of her role in the rehearsal room, Lee has said, “Basically I’m like a vampire and I suck out everybody’s genius and mush it together. That’s my job.” Entire processes may take 1 to 2 years (Lear’s took 2), but Lee also thrives on audience feedback from periodic workshop performances. A year into Lear’s development, she lost her Cordelia and had to start the process essentially from scratch, a phenomenon not unfamiliar to her. She describes her process as risky and at times terrifying, but one that she has come to trust instinctively. Lee is interested in constantly setting up and then frustrating audience’s expectations, so it is fitting that her process is so organic and constantly surprising even to her. Lee pushes herself to write outside what she knows, and her work is risky, experimental, and always wants to change audience’s hearts and minds.
As she discusses in her own company’s Mission and Vision, Lee always pushes herself to write in territory unfamiliar to her and to challenge her audience’s assumptions. Before writing Lear, Lee had written a piece inspired by her childhood (Pullman, WA), a satirical look at Asian-American identity (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), American Christianity (CHURCH) and black American identity (The Shipment). Though it is wildly diverse in subject matter, Lee’s work often explores our assumptions about subcultures, childhood, American identity, and incorporates metatheatricality. When Lear was commissioned by Soho Rep in 2008, Lee’s father was terminally ill. Using Shakespeare’s King Lear as a jumping off point, Lee wrote a play about our contemporary relationship to our own mortality and to grief. While it may seem that, of all the plays that preceded it, Lear was the most familiar in subject and personal stake, one might argue that perhaps awareness of mortality too, was unfamiliar territory for Lee: that she had to create work around it in order to begin to come to terms with it in herself.
– Adrienne Boris
Young Jean Lee's LEAR 