The Shipment
Known for her provocatively satiric performance works, Lee gave herself the most uncomfortable challenge she could imagine: to make—as a Korean-American—a black identity-politics work. In collaboration with an all-black cast, Lee takes the audience on an awkward and volatile roller-coaster ride through the absurdities and atrocities that arise when trying to discuss the black experience in America. Ludicrous, honest, and devoid of truisms, The Shipment dares to ask embarrassing questions and to seek solutions to impossible problems.
Cast Requirements
4 men
1 woman
Publisher
The Shipment and Lear (Theatre Communications Group, 2010).
Press
"Cultural images of black America are tweaked, pulled and twisted like Silly Putty in ‘The Shipment,’ a subversive, seriously funny new theater piece by the adventurous playwright Young Jean Lee . . . 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 . . . 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."
— The New York Times
Production and Development History
Workshops: Brooklyn Arts Exchange (2008), The Kitchen (2008).
Productions: Wexner Center for the Arts (2008), The Kitchen (2009), Kunstenfestivaldesarts (2009), Zurich Theater Spektakel (2009), PICA (2009), Rotterdam Seschouwburg (2009), On the Boards (2009), Festival d'Automne à Paris, in association with Theatre de Gennevilliers Centre Dramatique National de Creation Contemporaine (2009), Hebbel Theater (2009), Thalia Theatre (2010), Carolina Performing Arts - UNC Chapel Hill (2010), MCA Chicago (2010), Andy Warhol Museum (2010), Vienna Festival (2010), Sydney Opera House Vivid Live (2010).