The Shipment

Playwright and director Young Jean Lee, the provocative star of New York’s downtown theatre scene, has created “a subversive, seriously funny new theater piece,” as Charles Isherwood called it in The New York Times, but something more than that as well. The Shipment is the most talked about play in years — partly for its back story, partly for the brilliance of Lee’s realization of her vision, but largely for the perspective-upending shock it gives audiences near its end. Lee began with the most uncomfortable challenge she could imagine: to make, as a Korean America, a work of Black American identity politics. The product of this journey, born in collaboration with her all-black cast, is an awkward and volatile roller-coaster ride through the absurdities and atrocities that arise when trying to discuss the black experience in America. Ludicrous, honest, and devoid of truisms, The Shipment also manages to be, while addressing difficult and complex issues, outrageously funny.

This performance is made possible by the W. Ford Schumann ‘50 Endowment for the Arts and The Lipp Family Fund for Performing Artists.

“ This is so ingenious a twist, such a radical bit of theatrical smoke and mirrors, that, in rethinking everything that has come before… we are forced to confront our own preconceived notions of race. And to agree with Lee that we may not live long enough to purge ourselves of them.” Hilton Als in The New Yorker