4 NOVEMBeR - 8 NOVEMBeR 2009

Young Jean Lee’s
Theater Company

THE SHIPMENT

THEATRe

In partnership with the Festival d’Automne à Paris

English-language performance with French subtitles - duration : 1H30
Text and direction Young Jean Lee / With Jordan Barbour, Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Douglas Scott Streater, Prentice Onayemi, Amelia Workman / Staging David Evans Morris / Costumes Roxana Ramseur / Lighting Mark Barton / Sound Matthew Tierney / Choreography Faye Driscoll / Lighting assistant Raquel Davis  / Sound assistant Jason Sebastien / Technical direction Seymour

THE SHIPMENT is a corrosive, virulent, funny caricature of the imagery of Black American culture as projected in the media. Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company presents a "black identity-politics show", twisting and distorting the genre's most worn-out clichés, and exploring the unthinking, crazed logic of racial "filters" that divide the world into Black and White.

Korean American director Young Jean Lee relishes a challenge. His campaigning theatre makes a bonfire of our most deeply rooted cultural identities – stereotypes that affect and make victims of us all. Following his earlier explorations of American Christianity and the culture of American Asians, THE SHIPMENT is a new play offering a remarkably fresh, orignal examination of the American malaise. The first part of the play parodies Afro-American clichés, playing on the paranoia that grips the spectator the moment he steps outside his habitual frame of reference.

The second part is an extended satirical sketch embracing multiple genres, from dance numbers to burlesque comedy with "cardboard" characters acting out stereotypical racist discussions. A parade of the "usual suspects" (drug addict, rapper…) in highly unusual poses and postures holds up a pitiless mirror to society, exposing the stigmata of identity with corrosive humour.

The show was premiered in Columbus, Ohio, and enjoyed huge success in New York. While America celebrates the election of Barack Obama, thinking to bury its racist past, THE SHIPMENT examines the predominance of misguided stereotypes that are incapable of looking beyond skin colour, and which continue to define the consciousness of otherwise highly decent, "right thinking" individuals. This clever, subtle show is guaranteed to surprise, but steers clear of finger-pointing and polemic. THE SHIPMENT is an ambitious comedy offering a humourous, impartial examination of human relationships..
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Production Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company

Co-production Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Festival d’Automne à Paris

Production director Caleb Hammons / Associate directors Leah Winkler, Lee Sunday Evans
Commissionner Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University (World Premiere, October 2008) & The Kitchen (NYC Premiere, January 2009)

Partners Rockefeller MAP Foundation, Jerome Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, The Tobin Foundation et New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Collapsable Hole, IRT Theater, MacDowell Colony, New Dramatists, Orchard Project et Yaddo, The Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation, Ford Foundation and Association of Performing Arts Presenters, Ensemble Theatre Collaborations Grant Program.