"Have you ever noticed how most Asian Americans are slightly brain- damaged from having grown up with Asian parents?" begins the Korean American protagonist of Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the singular work by Young Jean Lee. This is the first collection by the downtown writer-director, whose explorations of stereotypes of race, gender, and religion are unflinching—and seat-squirming funny. This volume includes the following plays:
Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven
“Scathingly mischievous…Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is a provocateur's funny, guns-blazing take on the utter banality of ethnic stereotypes and other cross-cultural outrages. In its slyly eccentric way, it's an evening of enlightenment.†–Peter Marks, Washington Post
“Part performance art, part comic sketches, fights, dance, song and ‘reverse Bible study,’ and at times strangely serious, Dragons is a bracingly funny…always provocative equal-opportunity offender.†–Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Gate
“Miss Lee has a talent for evocative and sometimes grotesque imagery, and on the attack she is at the height of her powers.†–New York Times
Church
“I will happily worship in the house of Young Jean Lee.†–David Cote, TimeOut New York
“A thoroughly entertaining, uplifting, inescapable piece of art…So thought provoking, it's only appropriate to give thanks and praise.†–Helen Shaw, The New York Sun
Pullman, WA
"[Lee’s] new work has the deadpan simplicity of the plays of Richard Maxwell and the awkward, secretly suffering angst of a teenage diarist working through an identity crisis…. It is an honest [work] that takes itself seriously, and that is refreshing." -Jason Zinoman, New York Times
The Appeal
"The Appeal is the happiest literary desecration since Amy Freed's The Bard of Avon, in which Shakespeare declared, ‘I have great thought-like things within my head.’†-Jeremy McCarter, The New York Sun
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
“Lee is a queen of unease; chuckles never come unaccompanied by squirms.†–Village Voice
Yaggoo
“A rising star of the downtown theatre scene.†–New York Times
Young Jean Lee has written and directed shows in New York with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays include Straight White Men, We’re Gonna Die, Untitled Feminist Show, The Shipment, Lear and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award.
