From Our Hilton Als Desk: As one of few Asian playwrights—let alone directors and performers—in New York’s theatrical avant-garde, Lee is subjected to expectations that are rarely imposed on her white male colleagues. They are free to make art—often in conversation with one another—while she is supposed to be a standard-bearer for a culture that she does and does not feel a part of. Unlike the Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang, who creates well-crafted entertainments that show us something about Asian-American life from the inside, Lee’s goal is to question what the inside means. But she doesn’t stop there. For her, writing about Asian life, or about white American men, or about black life and speech from the perspective of black performers, isn’t very different from writing about eighteenth-century English poets: ultimately, Lee is interested in bodies, how we perceive them and how we inhabit them and how they are misshapen by eyes and minds that are not our own. Like the iconoclastic Cuban playwright María Irene Fornés, who, in a number of ways, is her predecessor, Lee doesn’t sacrifice her ethnicity for her art. Indeed, she sacrifices nothing; bodies, voices, jokes, food, tragedy, cities are all artistic fodder, as are her various selves and the mirthful, bloody life of her imagination.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 09:18:31 +0000
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