Korean American playwright Young Jean Lee will be the first Asian American woman to have a play debut on Broadway this summer, reports The Women’s Media Center. Her play, Straight White Men, originally opened Off-Broadway in 2014. Now the play will make its Broadway debut at the Helen Hayes Theater on June 29.
The lack of Asian American representation in performing arts is both a problem on screen and on stage. Hollywood has seen an increase in the number of Asian American produced media on screen with the premiere of shows like Fresh Off the Boat and The Mindy Project. Now, Young Jean Lee, a female Korean American playwright, is forging a path for Asian Americans by bringing her work to the stage.
Lee will be making history this summer as the first Asian American woman playwright to have a play appear on Broadway: https://t.co/yY1Ponh4KE
— Women’s Media Center (@womensmediacntr) June 21, 2018
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Although this is the first time her work will debut on Broadway, Lee has received praise for her work before. In 2012, her Off-Off-Broadway play, Untitled Feminist Show, received high praise. Theater critic Hilton Als said the piece was “one of the more moving and imaginative works [he had] ever seen on the American stage.” Charles Isherwood, a theater critic for The New York Times, called Lee “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.”
In her work, Lee tackles topics like racial prejudice, identity politics, and feminism. According to the Women’s Media Center, Straight White Men is a play disguised as a three-act “conventional family drama.” In reality, the play shows straight white men confronting issues of identity and privilege through a monopoly-inspired board game called “Privilege.”
In an interview with Los Angeles Times, Lee said that “the agenda of the play was to set a trap,” which would ensure that neither she or the audience could “get out of whatever problem the play was wrestling with.” The specific theatrical trap Lee uses in Straight White Men is humor. She told the Women’s Media Center that she used humor to “trick” an audience that is “predominantly White” and “quite resistant to identity politics” into “seeing different perspectives.”
The play not only challenges its audiences and its actors. Armie Hammer, who will star as Drew in the play’s upcoming debut, told Vogue that the play was an opportunity to “push” himself as an actor and “to be a part of something that really has something to say.” He praised Lee’s work for dealing “so well with the concepts of toxic masculinity and white privilege.”
“Straight White Men” might seem like a strange topic to some for a play about identity politics. However, according to the Women’s Media Center, Lee thinks it is “useful” to write about straight White men.
“I think that in the current climate there are people who resent any representation of straight White men whatsoever and think I should be writing solely about people from marginalized groups,” Lee told the Women’s Media Center. “But I think it’s useful to write about straight White men from a non-straight-White-male perspective. ”
For those who would like to see the show tickets are available online at the 2nd Stage website.
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