The Art of Choosing

The most controversial performance that I have watched this semester was Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. I originally chose this not because it sounded interesting, but because of the director herself. Young Jean Lee is the director as well as the playwright who runs her own company the Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company. Her bold endeavors are admirable and even more so because her plays are all on extremely tough subjects. They deal with feminism, race, privilege, and all the things that even make Young Jean Lee uncomfortable when she writes them. Her playwright’s philosophy is interesting: she wants to explore the uncomfortable topics and make her audiences move past their initial defense. She strives to “open people up to confronting difficult questions by keeping them disoriented and laughing”, as Young Jean Lee best puts it in her artistic statement.

My own experience going to watch the play was quite fascinating. I couldn’t believe they were playing the kind of music that they were playing as we were finding our seats before the show. The space itself was interesting and I felt it fit the personality of Young Jean Lee really well. The Public Theater had many different dynamics all housed under one roof. There is a bar just as you walk in, and a few parties going on at the same time with gentlemen and ladies dressed to the nines holding their posh glasses of wine. There were even women in their gowns holding glasses of wine and retouching their makeup in the bathroom. The group of people that were watching the play were mostly white and older, around 50-60, so it was fascinating to see their reactions to the very contemporary music. After the play, I tried to see Young Jean Lee’s perspective and understand why she would have used that particular music and I discovered one thing. The play was addressing issues that everybody seems to be tiptoeing around in society, and just how the rap song made the audience feel uncomfortable, it was a foreshadowing of the actual play. Young Jean Lee aims to make certain crowds uncomfortable by addressing taboo issues head on.

The storyline started off playful, showing a typical sibling interaction. As it goes on, we began to feel the building tension between the brothers. When the play climaxed, everything exploded. The unaddressed topics that were hiding behind the politeness of being respectful were confronted. Young Jean Lee took the epitome of privilege in society’s eyes, a straight white male, and made them seem so vulnerable. She taught the audience that there was flip side to being a straight white male and completely changed the view that they have it easy. What made her characters respectable were that they weren’t society’s stereotypical straight white males who took their privilege for granted. All the brothers were brought up by their mother to be fully aware of their status and privilege. This made the story and message even more impactful because they were equipped with the knowledge of social inequality. All in all this was a performance that I would like to watch again. I want to find something else that I might have missed in the experience or during the play.