ABOUT YOUNG JEAN LEE
"YOUNG JEAN LEE is a playwright, director, and filmmaker who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by The New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She’s the first Asian-American female playwright to have had a play produced on Broadway. She has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Her plays have been performed in more than eighty cities around the world and have been published by Dramatists Play Service, Samuel French, and Theatre Communications Group. Her short films have been presented at The Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and BAMcinemaFest. Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN Literary Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, and the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a professor and Nina C. Crocker Faculty Scholar at Stanford University." - Stanford Profiles
Education
Young Jean Lee attended Brooklyn College where she received an MFA and now is a professor at Stanford University. She studied to be a Shakespeare scholar for 10 years before deciding to work on experimental theater instead. Her dissertation was on her favorite play, King Lear, and King Leir, the play that Shakespeare stole from in order to write the famous King Lear we know today.
"I expected the original KING LEIR to really suck, but was surprised by how enjoyable a read it was. I found it much snappier and more coherent than Shakespeare’s version, which is sprawling, crazy, and messy. But Shakespeare’s version is massively more interesting. So I think the reason why I didn’t respond to mainstream contemporary theater was because the best of it felt much closer to KING LEIR than to KING LEAR. Entertaining and easy vs. wild and challenging. So weirdly, I think it was my love of Shakespeare that helped to drive me toward experimental theater." - Young Jean Lee, Harvard Advocate Interview
Writing Lear
Young Jean Lee wrote Lear when her father was battling an illness and she realized how she had to grow up to battle with her grief and the idea of mortality. The play is centered around the children because she felt like it was the only way to tell the story that needed to be told in an honest way.
The Young Jean Lee Approach
Young Jean Lee is not afraid of failure or to attempt something that she doesn't know how to do. She strives to "destroy the audience" with the goal of disrupting their self-complacency and creating intentional and thought provoking irritation. Young Jean Lee's approach is important to keep in mind as we work through our process of Lear for audience members at Carnegie Mellon, where there tends to be a lot of pressure to "get it right." However, "getting it right" for our playwright doesn't mean perfection, but means embracing failure, trusting the process, and accepting that there will always be things you don't know.
"I think this comes down to the fact that the thing that I hate the most is complacency. I don’t like it when people think that they know everything and they’re right and they are satisfied with themselves. One of the things I believe in most is self-critique and self-awareness. So every show is a challenge to myself, even in the way I approach it—even if it’s the last thing in the world I want to do, I’m forced to change." - Young Jean Lee