Truculent Theater

Photos by John H. Lee

Young Jean Lee is a fighter. She’s gamely taken on identity politics, Evangelical Christianity, even Kant.  Now she faces down Shakespeare’s seminal King Lear.  A New Yorker, not born and bred—childhood in Washington state, decade-long academic layover at Berkeley, final landing in New York as a playwright—she undoubtedly embodies the city’s singularly combative spirit.  Blithely dismissing 400 years of canon, she offers “this show isn’t about Shakespeare.” Instead, Lee is simply searching for material that can “profoundly move.”

“My objective,” she fires, “is to crack people open.”

In her playwriting, traditional methodology has been trashed and replaced: premise first, cast next, text last. “Grad school traumatized me,” Lee explains.  The unique process is both electric and dangerous; with her most successful show to date, The Shipment, initial workshops led her to despair “that it was going to be [her] failure,” but after a grueling complete recasting and rewriting, it became the best experience of her career.  With Lee’s work, it’s best to go in expecting the unexpected.  She’s unafraid to let a nuclear subject matter—African-American identity politics—drive the show at the expense of an uneasy audience.

She despises complacency, unwilling to let her educated, liberal downtown audience bask in any sense of superiority.  But most of all, she confesses, “every show is targeted toward myself.”

Originally the focus of her doctoral dissertation, Lear is the purest expression of Lee’s particular mélange of a stubborn will and an open mind.  Refusing to release Shakespeare’s framework, she acknowledges that the show could throw itself in any direction.  Lee does not flinch from letting her own personal tragedy push the development—her father’s failing health plays a part in the material—and this fight, with her own demons, will certainly be one her audience will not want to miss.