Young Jean Lee's idiosyncratic plays are acclaimed as much for making audiences think and laugh as making them squirm. Her previous experiments in discomfort included The Shipment, which featured an extremely talented all-black ensemble in a genre-defying show that explored how African Americans are perceived and portrayed in mass media. Last year's alternately funny and elusive Lear cut Shakespeare's title character completely out of the picture to probe the pain of watching parents move closer to death. Lee loves turning on a dime and catching the audience mid-laugh to hold up to the light what's motivating the laughter. more ›

That needy old man is out of the picture, wandering around somewhere out in the storm, and there's really nothing anybody can do about it. Sure, his daughters may experience occasional waves of regret or guilt, and it is a shame about "the gouging of the eyes and so forth," but what's done is done. In the end, we all end up alone, shivering in the rain—at least that's what the miserable, castle-dwelling aristocrats in Young Jean Lee's Lear keep telling themselves. She describes her very funny and very idiosyncratic new play as an "inaccurate distortion of Shakespeare's King Lear"—a wholly accurate description, as the title character doesn't even appear in her ninety minute curio. While he howls into the wind, his children pout in the parlor. more ›

Young Jean Lee's plays have been instant Off Broadway hits for their personal, probing, and typically hilarious explorations of race and religion in an ostensibly "post-racial" America. Her newest work, The Shipment, features an extremely talented all-black ensemble in a genre-defying show that looks at how African Americans are perceived and portrayed in mass media. As entertaining as it is thought provoking, it's also the best 15 bucks you can spend on theater in New York City at the moment. more ›