By the Skin of Our Teeth.(Young Jean Lee's works)

One generally hesitates before identifying a new trend in the American theatre, largely because language has a tendency to fix and limit the joy one feels at witnessing the stops and starts, the moments of grace, and the moments of awkwardness in the work of a fledgling director, performer, or playwright. One senses, however, that the thirty-four-year-old playwright and director Young Jean Lee wouldn't be content with inchoate praise for her work--work that is both explicitly political in content and often mundane in tone. Like her contemporaries the up-and-coming playwrights David Adjmi and Thomas Bradshaw (Bradshaw performed in one of Lee's early pieces), Lee is a facetious provocateur; that is, she does whatever she can to get under our skin--with laughs and with raw, brutal talk that at times feels gratuitous, and is meant to.

Beneath the surface, Lee seems to say in her work, most people are cauldrons of awfulness. Political correctness is a front--and, by now, a tattered one. Any talk of race in our post-"Raisin in the Sun" world seems like a tired joke. In a 2007 interview in American Theatre, Lee said of her 2005 play, "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven"--a powerful, humorous, and startling work about the author's violence toward herself and, subsequently, toward her female Asian characters--"For this project, I decided the worst thing I could possibly do was to make an Asian-American identity-politics show, because it can be a very formulaic, very cliched genre, and very assimilated into white American culture. It's almost become part of the dominant white power structure to have identity-politics plays about how screwed-over minorities are. It's such a familiar, soothing pattern. . . . It's become the status quo."

Lee knows something about the tensions of trying to assimilate. When she was two, her family emigrated from Korea to Pullman, Washington. After finishing high school there, she earned a B.A. at the University of California at Berkeley, in 1996, and was accepted into the university's Ph.D. program in English. Six years later, she abandoned academia and came to New York to pursue a career in theatre. By then, she was already a presence on the downtown scene, staging work that often featured a female character who was the target of some form of abuse. In her 1995 piece, "Pullman, WA," a young woman named Tory berates the audience and herself in the second person--"You have taken on way more responsibility than you can handle. . . . Your feelings of anxiety are fucking up your focus and productivity"--while a man named Pete goads her into further self-abnegation. The world Lee represents here is fuguelike and small, a culture in which men prey on the standard female anxieties. Tory is convinced that she's not doing enough in the world, for the world, and that she needs a man to remind her of her deficiencies; Pete's criticism provides her with a dreadful form of sustenance.

By the time Lee wrote "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven," she had learned how to pull more of the world into her dramaturgical constructions. A young woman called simply "Korean-American" says to the audience near the start of the play:

Have you ever noticed how most Asian-Americans are slightly brain-damaged from having grown up with Asian parents? It's like being raised by monkeys--these retarded monkeys who can barely speak English and are too evil to understand anything besides conformity and status. . . . Asian people from Asia are even more brain-damaged, but in a different way, because they are the original monkey. . . . I am so mad about all of the racist things against me in this country, which is America. Like the fact that the reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we . . . have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features.

Take "white" and "Asian" out of this speech, and you're left with the whiny lament of a discontented teen. Where does language take this character? What is she expressing, beyond a generalized self-loathing? And is what she has to say about race somehow validated by the fact that she herself is Asian? That is, do we accept what she has to say about Asians because she's speaking from the "inside"?

These kinds of questions come to the fore in Lee's most recent work. ...