"Because now there's this Asian female playwright who can be a role model for other artists of color, and I'm helping with diversity. "I can always say, 'Oh, well I'm just pursuing my own ambition, but I'm making the world a better place,' " she says. She had one of her own while working on Straight White Men in the largely white-run world of American theater. is exhibiting behavior that gets attributed to people of color: not being assertive, not standing up for himself, always being in a service position." "And I realized that the reason why they hated him was - despite all their commitment to social justice - what they believed in most was not being a loser. " Hated him," Lee said, clearly still surprised. He works for a not-for-profit and is guided by a sense of trying not to - in his words - "make things worse." Lee and Stanley workshopped the character in front of the students. The character, named Matt, is a sort of idealized straight white male. "When you hear that around the table, you just feel yourself sinking slowly into the chair," remembers James Stanley, who plays the character created from the list. It boiled down to this: They wanted the straight white male character to sit down and shut up. "I asked a roomful of women, queer people and minorities, 'What do you want straight men to do? And what do you want them to be like?' " she recalls. When she started working on Straight White Men, she took advantage of being a playwright in residence at Brown University. She was doing something very profound in terms of the ways in which we listen to 'ethnic speech' and 'regular speech.' " "Black and white people were confused," he observes. There's also a twist in The Shipment that it would be unfair to reveal, and that captivated New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als. Lee's process is to write plays using her cast to improvise scenes and ideas, and she developed this one with a group of five black actors. The first half of the play is an over-the-top compendium of cliches. It's partly an absurdist sendup of African-American stereotypes seen over and over in movies and on TV. And in a play from 2008 called The Shipment, she did something that's hard for a nonblack writer to do. She even wrote a play actually called The Untitled Feminist Show. With Straight White Men, Lee was interested in exploring a problem: What do you do when you've got privilege - and you don't want to abuse it? Lee, who is Korean-American, wanted to create straight white men on stage who think about these things. ![]() Her work revels in subverting stereotypes. The playwright, 40-year-old Young Jean Lee, is arguably one of the hottest playwrights in America right now. "What I just said wasn't racist/sexist/homophobic because I was joking," he deadpans. "Ah, 'excuses' card!" one of the brothers exclaims. Because the family is liberal and progressive, it's called "Privilege." It makes fun of their own straight-white-male privilege. Near the beginning of the new off-Broadway play, two adult brothers play a homemade, family board game, refashioned out of an old Monopoly set. ![]() The straight white men of Straight White Men aren't what you might expect.
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