Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, and Other Plays
Some major international theatre encyclopedia (I forget which, but I believe Geilgud was the titular editor) made me furious once for its dismissive description of Sam Shepard. The assessment was something along the lines of “amazingly inept in his early work but he eventually started writing real plays in the late 1970s.” This is a common attitude among the general public (insofar as they ever think about such things) but the G.P. can be forgiven for occasional philistinism: they’re too busy building bridges and serving lattes and driving taxi cabs to dwell much (at all) on theatrical aesthetics.
Critics and editors, however, should know better. As I recall, the edition of the book of which I’m thinking was from the 1980s or 90s. Shepard’s freeform experiments – as valid as those of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock or Lester Young – were by then decades old, and clearly not a matter of ineptitude but bold artistic choice. And furthermore, they were clever, powerful, funny, poetic, and theatrical in a way that most conventional playwriting rarely seems to be.
Dismissal of this kind of experimentation has been my bete noir for decades. I came to New York with a trunk full of such plays, many of them produced for audiences of appreciative crickets. It turns out I was two decades behind the times, but also two decades ahead. There now seems to be a receptive audience again (if a downtown one) for wildly nonlinear work, largely I think due to the indefatigable proselytizing of artists like Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered Young Jean Lee’s work was of the same type.
I’d seen her name (if not her work) constantly, reinforced by the branding masterstroke of her naming her theatre “Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company”, after the fashion of dance troupes. I’d seen but one of her plays “Christmas”, which must be the most economical play to produce ever written: it consists of a set (a tiny house) and taped voices – but no live actors. Other than this, her popular downtown hits (the ones contained in the just published Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven) are new to me. And new is the operative word. Her writing has remarkable freshness and spontaneity, as though she’s managed to switch off the inner censor that usually throttles the id before it wriggles out into the ether. Consistency of character, voice, situation are all intentionally up for grabs.
What makes her work still more interesting is that this formalism (or antiformalism, which of course a kind of formalism) is mixed with devastating honesty. The freeing up her own voice enhances, rather than diverts from, the expression of her identity as an Asian-American, as a woman, as a Pacific Northwesterner, as a jack Christian, as a whatever else she is. Her work represents a new, far richer and more highly evolved state of affairs than the literal-minded, often autobiographical identity-based writing that was so popular in the 1980s. (The stridency of that writing can be forgiven though when you recall the presence of the character “Long Duck Dong” in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles. I am a vaudevillian and that character even offends me.)
Young Jean Lee deals with such stereotypes from a seeming position of strength. She can slap them around, she can explode them, she can ignore them, she can even pay them homage. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals the purported villain is “Fu Manchu” — not the historical dynastic ruler, but something closer to the reprehensible stereotype once played by Peter Sellers. But not quite. The character is black, though dressed in Chinese clothes. In the original production, it was played by Thomas Bradshaw. And though he is the traditional villain, and seems that way for awhile, in the end, he and all the “oriental masses” are wiped out by a pair of stereotypical white people named Terence and Sheila (the supposed victims) using an “oriental killing machine”.
In The Appeal, “Coleridge”, “Wordsworth” and “Byron” fight like a bunch of high school girls, and even sort of talk like them. While they are poets and banter about poetry and philosophy, the names of the characters are carrying most of the symbolic freight. Their speech is contemporary and frequently moronic. (This is a technique I call the “Whatever Aesthetic” and credit to Gen X and the trickle-down influence of punk. The humor derives from a certain “fuck you” to the expectations of the audience. I’ll expand on this idea in a future post).
All playwrights with any self-awareness know that all of their characters are merely some version of themselves. Lee takes that fact of life and makes it manifestly obvious, in much the same way that many painters set out to show that paintings are “just paint on canvas”. Her plays, despite the fact that many have several characters and “situations” (if not exactly plots) still feel like stream of consciousness interior monologues taking place inside the head of Young Jean Lee. Some stretches are like automatic writing – surreal. Some express modern angst, neurosis, self-doubt, self criticism. Some express racial bugaboos. Some express metaphysical questioning. Pullman, WA (named for no reason and for every reason in the world after her home town) contains all these streams, and are spoken by three characters who are “named” after whoever is playing them at the time. In essence it is a soliloquy.
These two tendencies (the free exploration of stereotype and this flattening out and splintering of character) come together in the title piece, in which the characters are merely divided into “Koreans” and “White Persons” and the theme of racial identity is kicked around like a pig’s bladder. A major color in her work is the latent cruelty in the seemingly gentle – it appeals to me very much. Traditionally, Asian women are socially docile. Layered over this, you have the Evangelical Christianity Lee was raised in. But bubbling and simmering beneath them both…let’s just say I wouldn’t want to take one of those kicks (but of course I have, every time one of her characters levels a shot gun at Europeans. Thank God I’m part Cherokee or I might be dead!)
And speaking of thanking God, the most recent play in the bunch Church deals with her religious upbringing. An appropriate subtitle might be “The Revenge”. A bunch of smiling, bubble-headed Christians preach to the audience, the things they say growing crazier and more nonsensical as they go along, but their attitude remaining the same. Anyone who has ever watched JoelOsteen knows this isn’t absurdism, but kitchen sink realism.
