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and undermine the conventional structure, language, and characterization of commercial theater while rejecting outdated notions of the avant-garde.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.
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.
