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Young Jean Lee's Theater Company

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Last Update: 2025-12-11

Mission Young Jean Lee's Theater Company creates and produces new, experimental performances for theater that are written and directed by Young Jean Lee. In their citation from the 2010 American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Awards, the Academy members wrote: "Young Jean Lee's plays are fierce, challenging, brazenly theatrical, and then transcendentally lyrical. Her wit is both biting and hilarious. Her subjects big, bold, and daring, but truthful and humane. In seven years, as author and director, she has created a theater like none other, and with it, a fresh dramatic language for the multi-cultural American stage." Artistic Statement When starting a play, I ask myself, "What's the last play in the world I would ever want to write?" Then I force myself to write it. I do this because I've found that the best way to make theater that unsettles and challenges my audience is to do things that make me uncomfortable. I work with stories that I find trite and embarrassing, I keep the development of the text as open and unstable as possible throughout the rehearsal and performance process, and I emphasize rather than hide problems in the text and production. I'm constantly trying to find value in unexpected places. My work is about struggling to achieve something in the face of failure and incompetence and not-knowing. The discomfort and awkwardness involved in watching this struggle reflects the truth of my experience. -Young Jean Lee www.youngjeanlee.org