At a time when most serious drama being written and produced for the American stage aspires only to mainstream acceptance and high-toned mediocrity, an innovative new generation of playwrights based in New York City has emerged, crafting works that challenge and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde. New Downtown Now brings together ten new works that exemplify the playfulness, excitement, and possibilities of the theater. Characterized by fragmenting structure, hypnotic rhythms, kaleido-scopic imagery, unpredictable characters, and lyrical language, these plays resemble puzzles from which the writers are teasing revelations. Though disparate in subject matter and style, with characters ranging from a sushi chef to a soldier and settings from a taxicab to a live television broadcast, these highly original plays share a commitment to formal experimentation that places them beyond the psychological clichés of the majority and the cold condescension of postmodernism. The anthology includes Interim by Barbara Cassidy; Tragedy: a tragedy by Will Eno; Nine Come by Elana Greenfield; Shufu-Sachiko and Enoshima Island by Madelyn Kent; The Appeal by Young Jean Lee; The Vomit Talk of Ghosts by Kevin Oakes; Ajax (por nobody) by Alice Tuan; Apparition, an uneasy play of the underknown by Anne Washburn; Demon Baby by Erin Courtney. Mac Wellman is the author of numerous plays and the recipient of three Obie awards, most recently in 2003 for lifetime achievement. He is professor of playwriting at Brooklyn College. Young Jean Lee is a playwright and director, and member of the Obie award-winning company 13P. Jeffrey M. Jones is a playwright and curator of the Obie award-winning Little Theater at Tonic in New York.
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YOUNG JEAN LEE was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley's English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before dropping out and moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at the Public Theater (CHURCH), (P.S. 122 (CHURCH; Pullman, WA), HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), Soho Rep (The Appeal), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals). She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, has done residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now, an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself, in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French), American Theatre magazine (September 2007), and will soon be published in a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group). She is the recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her work has been invited to tour to venues in Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Salamanca, Toulouse, Portland, Seattle, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis. She will direct her new play The Shipment at the Walker Art Center from October 30-November 2, 2008, and at The Kitchen from January 8-24, 2009. She will direct her adaptation of King Lear at Soho Rep in January 2010, and has been commissioned to write a new musical (with music by Mike Doughty) for Playwrights Horizons. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company (www. youngjeanlee.org) and is the recipient of the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel and a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award.
