“The Shipment” Delivers Uncomfortable Laughs
The Shipment. Produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street.
A few days before Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment opened at The Kitchen last month, the playwright/director’s Facebook status read, “Young Jean needs to figure out how to get black audiences to The Shipment.” Five days later, she wrote “Young Jean can comp you to The Shipment if you are black,” and gave instructions on how to contact her. A few days after that, she updated, “Young Jean wants to put reserved signs that say ‘Black Person’ in prime locations in the theatre where we put critics and presenters. Too much?”
Before long, enthusiastic reviews appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others, and Lee’s status updates became warnings to friends and fans that the show was quickly selling out, then that it had sold out, then that there was going to be a one-week extension, and finally that the extension had sold out as well. I attended the night before the show closed and it was clear that the buzz had spread. Lincoln Center Artistic Director Andre Bishop sat in the row in front of me; Stephen Sondheim sat in the row in front of Bishop. The rest of the audience was made up largely of the usual Kitchen hipsters (whites and Asians with geeky glasses, skinny jeans, artfully messy hair, and the occasional ironic facial hair), but sprinkled with some older Philharmonic types and even a few of the sought-after African Americans. (Reports from previous performances indicate that the The Shipment enjoyed varied and diverse audiences over the course of its run.)
Why this focus on audience demographics? As with her previous plays, Lee began by asking herself what was the least comfortable idea for a show she could think of. What sounded like a terrible idea? What did she absolutely not want to do? When she has asked herself these questions previously, the results have included Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, an exploration of Asian-American identity politics, and Church, an on-stage Christian church service incorporating song, dance, and sermon while confronting issues of faith and doubt, individuality and community. When Lee asked herself what sounded like a terrible idea this time around, she decided that a play about African-American identity politics, written by a Korean-American woman, was probably a bad idea. So she started writing.
The result is angry, funny, probing, and deeply uncomfortable. This discomfort is very much the heart of The Shipment. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Lee observed that audiences began “laughing more enthusiastically [after] the positive reviews [were] published, and it’s so painful sometimes. I know that’s unfair of me because I wrote it to be funny, and the performers are funny, but I feel there is so much in there that people should not laugh at. Part of me would rather have them sit there in silent uneasiness.” Indeed, on the night I attended, there seemed to be some disagreement in the audience as to which bits were funny, and where it was appropriate to laugh. Mr. Sondheim, for example, laughed more than anyone else in the audience, particularly at any moment that crossed the lines of political correctness to stage stereotypes of blacks and whites alike. Others never recovered from the slap they received early on when a comedian character veered from comedic confrontation to undisguised hurt and anger, to scatology, and back again. Parts of this scene were Def Comedy-like, and received Def Comedy-like laughs, but most of the audience was smart enough to know when the guy on stage was attacking them and meaning it. So they got quiet.
The Shipment opens with two wordless sequences that evoke minstrelsy and hip hop, respectively, and are stylized in such a way to indicate that the show will be about the performance of blackness, the representation of blackness, and the perception of blackness. These high-energy sequences also serve to set the stage for the comedian scene already mentioned.
The second half of the play is made up of two acts that could stand on their own as fully playable short pieces, though they would of course lose the context of the larger show, which provides much of the thematic and political complexity. First comes the story of a young black man who dreams of being a rap star but can’t afford to enter a hip hop festival or contest so gets talked into dealing drugs by his nefarious friend. In prison, he discovers Islam and finds his rapping voice. Once he achieves fame and fortune, he finds them both hollow. That it is so easy to imagine this plot as a Hollywood film is the whole point of the sequence. The characters are played in an intentionally stilted, even wooden style that points to the creakiness of the stereotypes presented.
The final scene finds the all-black cast playing white characters, though this is not immediately evident. Pesceveganism, late twenties crises, parlor games, body-image issues, and cocaine are just a few of the elements that make up this eviscerating lampoon of the anxieties of middle-class, educated whites who are unable or unwilling to see the extent of their own privilege and self-indulgence. Several of the elements of this scene recall things that were said by the comedian as he made fun of white people.
No one moment in, or aspect of, The Shipment can be singled out as exemplary of the entire project. Lee is intent on confronting her audience, and herself, with aspects of themselves and their culture that make them uncomfortable, but she is also interested in exploring how these same tensions are interwoven into the material we consume for entertainment. Finally, she acknowledges that she and her audience also want to be entertained, and that this kind of material runs the risk of encouraging self-satisfaction from those who like to congratulate themselves for their liberalism, their open-mindedness, and their occasional feelings of guilt.
I have two quibbles with this production, though both might be considered frivolous. The first is that the cast, while listed in the program, are in no way linked to the roles that they play. In other words, unless you have access to press photos, there is no way to check your program for the name of an actor who made a particularly strong impression. There are reasons for this: the play is complex, and the actors play multiple characters, creating a logistical obstacle. Also, the show is an “ensemble piece,” with no one actor foregrounded, the kind of show that often just lists the performers alphabetically in order to avoid placing them in any kind of hierarchy. (In this case, they seem to be listed in order of appearance, which might be useful if it were noted.)
My objection to this admittedly minor slight, is that this is very much a performer-driven play. It’s clear that Lee is a major talent as both actor and director, but her success relies on collaboration with a skilled, disciplined, talented, and enthusiastic cast that also had considerable input into the structuring of the play itself. The performances navigate levels of stylization and realism, empathy and alienation, that go a long way towards making the play as complex as it is. For a show written and directed by Young Jean Lee, and produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company to make it difficult to identify any one actor reinforces the genius/auteur mythology that dominates so much theatrical analysis. (For the record, I was particularly impressed by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, whose offbeat performance was simultaneously charming and distancing, familiar and strange. In a show largely about stereotypes, Jennings created characters that were recognizable as such, and that still felt like something I had never seen before.)
Another possible objection to the show is that, in pedagogical terms, it is a lecture, not a seminar. Lee and her team maintain absolute control over everything except for the degree to which the audience might laugh or not. The production opened and closed with a dramatic, absolute blackout, a clear signal that it was time to pay attention and listen to what Lee had to say. When a show is designed in no small part to attack the assumptions of the audience, it might be argued that the audience should have some opportunity to defend themselves. A playwright whose work occasionally screams “Fuck you!” might consider giving her fans a chance to scream it right back. Lee’s impressive degree of control over her production is a part of why I enjoyed it, but it also makes the experience of watching the show a rather passive one, despite all the techniques she employs to keep us off balance and alert.
Regardless of these quibbles, which should be read more as queries than complaints, Young Jean Lee has further solidified her place as one of the most notable theatre artists working today. The Shipment is a remarkable piece of work that made me squirm and laugh in equal measure. A first-rate cast and design team, a smart and challenging text, and Lee’s ongoing experiment to challenge herself in uncomfortable ways have clearly paid off. Lee’s next project is an adaptation of King Lear that, as she writes in her blog, she wants “to make a hard-core, old-school, Aristotelian pity-and-fear tragedy that will work on today’s jaded audiences in the way I like to imagine the Greek tragedies worked on the Greeks.” Sounds like a terrible idea; it’ll probably be great.
The Shipment (closed), written and directed by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Mikeah Ernest Jennings, Douglas Scott Streater, Prentice Onayemi, Okierete Onaodowan, and Amelia Workman. With Foteos Macrides and Joseph John. Sets by David Evans Morris. Costumes by Roxana Ramseur. Lights by Mark Barton. Sound by Matthew Tierney. Choreography by Faye Driscoll. Fight Choreography by Jason McDowell Green. Produced by Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company at The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street. January 8 -31, 2009.
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