Young Jean Lee – författare

"Sly, weird, and thoroughly winning . . . Bracing, funny, and, yes, consoling."—The New York Times

"Young Jean Lee will give you whiplash. Her ability to stake out aesthetic territory and then abruptly abandon it makes her unpredictable; her tendency to excel at each new genre makes her terrifying. In the enormously touching cabaret-style We''re Gonna Die, Lee jettisons everything that has armored this au courant young playwright against the world. . . . Lee purchases our hearts with her bravery''s own coin."—Time Out New York

Inspired by her personal experiences with despair and loneliness, the Obie Award–winning playwright-provocateur and her band Future Wife create a life-affirming show that anyone can perform, about the one thing everyone has in common: we''re all gonna die. Each book includes a CD of all six songs and eight monologues performed by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Adam Horowitz, and others.

Young Jean Lee has been hailed as "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee''s Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her other plays include The Shipment, Lear, and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award.

“Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show is one of the more moving and imagina­tive works I have ever seen on the American stage…what makes it so transcendent is its delicious ability to alternate the pain of being different with a sense of humor about lives not lived among the status quo.” —Hilton Als, New Yorker

“The twisty, turbulent, argumentative work of Young Jean Lee…will make you flinch, but it’s hard to look away…Lee has always been interested in exposing how we perform our identities. But in Straight White Men, she drills into something more core. Shuck off, subvert, cleave to your gender or race all you like, but a universal horror of weakness remains—a collective orientation toward status, power, control.”

—Parul Sehgal, New York Times

“Who said the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak? Both are pretty damn fierce in director Young Jean Lee’s all-nude dance suite cheekily (but purposefully) called Untitled Feminist Show. In a scant (and scantily clad) hour, Lee and her gutsy danc­ers try on a dizzying variety of modes and masks to shake up gender norms.” —David Cote, Time Out New York

“Straight White Men might be the most subversive thing that Young Jean Lee, one of American theater’s most keenly seditious practitioners, has ever done.” —Alexis Soloski, Guardian

“Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times

Young Jean Lee, with Straight White Men, became the first Asian-American woman to have her play produced on Broadway. She has directed her work in more than thirty cities around the world, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a PEN Literary Award.