Event

Lear by Young Jean Lee

Part 2 of City Garage's three-part project "The Winter of Our Discontent: Shakespeare in the Digital Age."

The West coast premiere of the widely-acclaimed new text. In Lear, experimental playwright Young Jean Lee's self-described "inaccurate distortion" of the classic, she banishes the title monarch and most of the other male characters to the wings and focuses instead on the younger generation: Lear's three daughters and Gloucester's two sons. The absurdist, meta results are irreverent, grotesque, and morally harrowing.

An austerely lunatic West Coast premiere at City Garage....Playwright Young Jean Lees 2009 dissection of the motives and psychosexual dilemmas of the progeny who drive the Bards towering masterwork [is] a wildly prismatic riff on existential identity, the patriarchy, internecine attraction/repulsion and more.As such, its a natural fit for ever-adventurous City Garage. Director Frédérique Michel treats the intermissionless proceedings as a hybrid of Renaissance masque, absurdist romp and college counseling session, and her fine-tuned cast follows suit.Devotees of its author and this cutting-edge company should flock.

David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times

"Lee is one of the most vital, rewarding playwrights to arrive on the scene in the past decade."
Time Out New York

"Lee uses King Lear and some beautifully unconventional additions to flesh out Shakespeare's themes of loneliness, mortality, and filial responsibility in gratifying and moving depth."
Variety

"Young Jean's Lear is Shakespeare rotates in four-dimensional space to reveal what is lost in most productions: the cold, hard claims of nothingnessthe implacable something/nothing out of which we all come, and into which we vanish without a trace. The simple power of the work is terrific, often sardonic, always relentless; Lear is certainly Lee's best work yet."
Mac Wellman