Straight White Men & Untitled Feminist Show: two plays
Two compassionately subversive plays about identity, by Young Jean Lee, a Korean American playwright whose work is groundbreaking, humorous and often thrillingly transgressive.
In Straight White Men, it's Christmas Eve, and Ed has gathered his three adult sons to celebrate with matching pyjamas, trash-talking, and Chinese takeaway. But when a question they can't answer interrupts their seasonal cheer, they are forced to confront their own identities.
Raucous, surprising and fearless, Straight White Men takes an outside look at the traditional father/son narrative, shedding new light on a story we think we know all too well. It had its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse, London, in 2021, following US productions including a Broadway run that made Lee the first Asian-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
In Untitled Feminist Show, six charismatic stars of the theatre, dance, cabaret and burlesque worlds come together in an exhilaratingly irreverent, nearly wordless celebration of a fluid and limitless sense of identity.
Untitled Feminist Show isn't a show about feminism – it is a feminist show. It premiered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 2012 before transferring to the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City.
'Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation' New York Times