** Post-screening discussion with Sophie Franco, assistant director of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, Washington Ensemble Theatre’s Ryan Diaz, and WWU professor Andrew Brown **

** Co-presented with On the Boards and Washington Ensemble Theatre **

For The Shipment, Young Jean Lee gave herself the most uncomfortable challenge she could imagine: to make—as a Korean-American—a show about black identity. The show was made in collaboration with an all-black cast and is divided into two parts. The first half is structured like a minstrel show—dance, stand-up routine, sketches, and a song—and was written to address the stereotypes the cast members felt they had to deal with as black performers. For the second half of the show, Lee asked the actors to come up with roles they’d always wanted to play, and wrote a naturalistic comedy in response to their requests.

“What we need to do more of is to talk, to break down the wall of silence that determines what is and is not okay to express about race, and The Shipment is almost precision engineered to force that on the audience by causing them to acknowledge their own assumptions, which is deeply uncomfortable.” – Jeremy M. Barker, The SunBreak

Photos courtesy of Young Jean Lee Company.