Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director who has worked in New York City since 2002. She founded the Young Jean Lee's Theatre Company in 2003 where she produced a number of her own plays. She can be classified as a "1.5 generation" Asian American playwright who has added her particular voice about diasporic Asian woman’s issues to American theatre. Her creative and artistic interests were not limited to academic reading and writing, but expanded to live theatre and performance. Her works thematically involve the daily issues and interaction among contemporary American people. In her theatrical works, Young Jean Lee challenges the audience to rethink the nature of race or gender stereotypes in the USA through her trajectory of reconsidering these stereotypes.
This thesis focuses on two of her most recent and controversial works, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (2006) and The Shipment (2008). Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of Asian American theatre history and specifically situates Lee’s work within a context of Korean American playwrights since 1990s where they appeared for the first time in any significant number. The next two chapters analyze Lee's multiple narratives of race, culture, and diaspora, and her attempt to deconstruct and explode ever present and recycled stereotypes of Asian Americans and African Americans. Chapter 2 focuses on Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and explores Lee's representation of Asian and Asian American women. Chapter 3 considers The Shipment and analyzes Lee's experimental, racial cross-dressing as a strategic interpellation against widespread stereotypes of African Americans. Chapter 4 concludes the thesis with some brief considerations of her next work.
The thesis considers the theatre critics discussions on her work noting that she has been referred to as the "Queen of Unease" and that her plays veer dramatically from comedy, to exaggerated violence, to subtle irony, moments that are unsettling and often difficult for an audience. Lee has developed her own notion of playwriting, which she calls her concept of 'the last' play. Whenever she makes a decision to write a play, she asks herself what is the ‘last play’ in the world she would want to write? For her the last play is the most difficult, the one that will give her the most difficult challenges. Once she answers that question she decides that is the play she will tackle. In Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven she focused on her own Asian American identity by staging her own recorded voice and filmic image. In The Shipment she bravely takes on African American stereotypes. During the rehearsal process she relied on continual feedback from the black cast to develop the script. Her works provide a vacillating uneasiness that establishes a critical distance for the audience to rethink the arbitrary connections between the constructed stereotypes of people and the actual people.