Top American playwright Young Jean Lee talks to Emma Berge about love, her new show and goiters.
“No one ever asks me about my love life,” laughs Young Jean Lee. “I'm obsessed with gossip magazines. I do lots of interviews, but because I do experimental theatre all of the questions are intelligent and no one ever asks really obnoxious interview questions.”
Young Jean Lee was born in Korea and raised in America, where she did a PhD in English. During our talk, she's laid back and laughs a lot – clearly, she's used to being interviewed. This would be because of her current status in America: she's been writing and directing her own work for seven years now, earning her numerous awards including an Emerging Playwright OBIE Award and a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the prestigious American Theater magazine she was named as one of the 25 artists who will shape American theatre over the next 25 years. Her work has travelled the world. But in the many interviews she's done, she's never been asked the question she would have loved to be asked: how's your love life?
“I met my boyfriend online,” she answers the question in bemusement. “On the website it asks 'what are you looking for in a man', and I said 'goiters', which is a growth on your neck which is really disgusting. And the dating website suggested this guy Tim. They said he's really compatible. So I looked at his profile and in the section where it said 'what do you have to offer a woman' he said 'a massive goiter'. And we've been together ever since.”
It's surprising that no one asks Young Jean Lee the more personal questions about her life. Her work is always about something that's affecting her at the time – her artistic statement says that she thinks of the last play in the world she would ever want to write, then writes it.
In the case of Pullman, WA, the show she's bringing to London for SACRED season at Chelsea Theatre, she wrote it after going through a divorce. “The divorce wasn't ugly,” she says, “but divorce is just a terrible experience and people are broken by that. Then I had to make this show. I thought I was the last person in the world to help people, I was in no position to help people. And the last thing I wanted to do was teach people to be happy.”
So that was the show she wrote. The play contains three people on stage “who are not that smart”, but nevertheless try to help people in the audience find happiness. “It's awkward because they're not professionals and they don't know what they're saying. They're trying to help people live a better life and they keep failing.”
Given that she demands so much from herself, how, I ask her, can she possibly motivate herself to write? She laughs ruefully and admits to a somewhat unorthodox way of writing theatre: “It's difficult and you want to procrastinate, so it's really terrible. I will get a gig, I'll get a premiere and all the tickets will be sold and all the press and marketing will be done, and I'll have the actors – and then I have to write something.” Maybe it's for this reason that her shows have often been described as having a sense of urgency and desperation behind them. But it might be because of the subjects of her shows.
“My whole work aesthetic is about human weakness and failure and people either love it or hate it. The people that are super together, who block out all emotional problems, they hate my work. The people that seem fine on the outside but on the inside are obsessing over the little things – and unfortunately there's a lot of them out there – they're my fan base.”
Despite the uncomfortable concept behind the play, it isn't all doom and gloom. She chose this play as her London début because it's the one with the most English sense of humour in it. She says she would have loved to have British actors in it. When I ask if there are any ones in particular, she immediately says, “yes! Rob Brydon.”
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