 I'm the writer, filmmaker, and director, Young Jin Mi. Yay! The event. And the doctoral students in our program nominate an elected individual or an organization that had a significant impact on theater and performance in New York City. Now in its fourth decade, the award has provided a unique opportunity to bring the professional and academic theater communities together. And tonight, I'm excited to say, we're doing it again. In 2005, Young Jin's Songs of the Dragons, Flying to Heaven, was presented at the Siegel Center's Prelude Festival, which is dedicated to discovering new artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theater, dance, interdisciplinary, and media ties performance. Young Jin Li has continued to push work and has been called the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation by the New York Times. And one of the best experimental playwrights in America by Time Out New York. It is my greatest pleasure to honor her as our 36th Edwin Booth Award recipient. Ceremony is made possible by gracious support from the doctoral students council, the Martin East Siegel Theater Center, and the doctoral theater students association. And I'd like to give special thanks to our professors, Marvin Carlson, David Savram, and Jean Graham Jones for their gracious support. Five years ago, I saw Young Jin Li's piece, We're Gonna Die, for the first time. This was back in Seoul right around the time I had gotten the word of my admission to our program. And at the time, I could never have imagined that I'd be producing and speaking at an award ceremony honoring her. And I still can't believe our paths have crossed this way. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our first speaker for the night, doctoral student Nina Angela Mercer. Unfortunately, Nina could not be here with us tonight, but she sent along a video recording. So, here's Nina. I believe in theater. It's sometimes magic and urgency. It's sometimes big bells after a bursting from someone's chest in the house of the strangest moments, revealing some mystery of perception. I believe in the way theater makes a world that simply don't exist except in our imaginations and sometimes on the stage. And I believe in playwrights. Razorily audacious playwrights bold enough to do this crazy work. We picked apart, adored, ignored, misunderstood, troubled by night sweats before opening night, cold crowds and reviewers, actors who just won't stick to the script. So, I watched The Shipman by Yevgy Lee online. But because I believe in theater. For those who don't know, The Shipman untaxed black stereotypes. The first half of the play is presented at the Vaudeville show, right with the most reproduced stereotypes of blackness and performance. We are all always performing against them somehow, I guess. In some of mine, most often not our own. But the second half of the play, the black cast members provided the playwright with roles they wished they would play. She created a naturalistic drama in response to that with those characters. Back in February, I listened to rather than Jacob Jenkins, Alivia Harris, Jackie Sibley's jewelry, all the conversation at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. This is one of my cents, whole-time. To give inside the auditorium there at the Schomburg, you literally have to walk on top of a congo cosmogram, a portal that you will under which life likes to use the dashes. And on this particular evening, these black playwrights were talking about the representation of blackness in theater, asking what is real black, what is authentically black, what voices are allowed to be black, the black playwright, someone else, neither. In that moment, I wish to make some news because in the back of the Schomburg auditorium we throw it back a drink at a makeshift bar. There was no bar. But after what I thought, I don't want to hear another conversation about what blackness isn't, because it just is. I don't want to hear another conversation about what blackness sounds like. It just is in all of this variation. I want a flood of soulful plays, spilling hearts all over the place, killing us softly like a verdict bag and making messes of everything we thought we knew. Whether this is possible or not, I know theater is a place where it's impossible so I can save it here. I can own it here. I think freedom is really good to imagine and I know it must be funky, like dead face funky and it must not be questioned whether the skies fall in and the ground broken free from gravity and somebody stuck up my shoe and be deserted. I do not think theater should have white as if it were Facebook posts or worse. Those red, red hearts that aren't hearts at all are kind of love rebranded. So I will say this without reading likes or whatever. Young Jean Lee, the shipment is a black soul play and many representations of blackness. But it is black in other ways too and it is you and every actor on that stage and maybe some imaginary friend of someone's too or a nightmare. It could very well be a black nightmare in a white person's mind or vice versa, channeled through you or Korean American woman or maybe it's what these black actors dream they could be. Whether black or unmarked by skin, a thumb, nose or a middle finger at all the struggle for gigs they've known it could be but yes, it is also about race and it is funky trouble and I thank you. While I watched, I did not laugh not once but I wasn't in the audience. I felt no need to perform nor could I catch the spirit of my neighbor's laughter. I was alone at home and it's no longer 2009. Barack Obama is not the president and no one says post-racial much anymore. Instead, I am the silence and the screw face watching from my desk chair. I think your play, Young Jean Lee, unleashed something inside me that I did not know was barking in the first place. It felt a little like iodine on an always open wound that's mostly undetectable. We're good at hiding for survival, you know. Where you call people out with your worlds on stage and that play felt a little like some blackness I know, some whiteness too. The struggle against the box meant to hold all of us but it also felt like nothing I've ever known and that is right and good because as I said in the beginning, theater creates worlds, impossible worlds and ask the most dangerous questions and I wonder if you gather those same actors today and ask them what roles they want to play or what blackness or not blackness at all, simply humanness from inside their vest, subjectivities, what would they say? I believe you would confront that particular storm, Young Jean Lee, I believe you would commit to lines on the page and sit in the house and listen to your audience. No matter how uncomfortable I can tell because you are audacious. I applaud you and implore you to keep making us uncomfortable. Clearly, we need it. Next is a stage reading by doctoral students Ash Marinaccio, A. Yulia Kinchi, Jessica Adam and Jenny Yusef. They will read a scene from Straight White Man which played to great critical acclaim in 2014 at the Public Theater and this summer the play is returning to Mark as Mark the first play by an Asian American female playwright to be produced on Broadway. Ed, the father. Matt, the elder. Jake, the middle. Drew, the youngest. So Matt, tell me why you're interested in working for our foundation? Because I guess I'm interested in the job because I graded a lot of papers while I was in grad school. I graded a lot of papers and they were, I have that skill, which is not to say that I have any of the actual copy editing skills were required for this job, but I'm assuming I could learn them if you know I were taught. Matt, that was great. No, it wasn't. That was terrible. It was? Dad, I think you're moving a little fast here. Matt needs to deal with a whole bunch of shit before he can handle something like this. No, he could do it if he wanted. He could do it in his sleep. He's just choosing not to. I'm not qualified for this job. It doesn't matter what skills you have. You have to make yourself qualified. I'll show you. Watch. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. A little about why you're interested in working for our foundation. Well, Sam told me about the position. Sounds great. He spoke very high of you. Yeah, well, he's a great friend. We met on our year abroad to Ghana when we were both at Harvard. Ghana, that's an interesting choice. We were a part of a project that trained villagers in rural areas to build sustainable housing. That sounds fascinating. Anyway, I've been a fan of your organization for a long time. You guys set the standard for international human rights. It would be a dream to work with you in any capacity. Matt, your resume shows a BA from Harvard, 10 years in Stanford's PhD program, and 15 years at various non-profits and community organizations. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Well, for a long time, I thought I might stay in academia, but it started to feel too theoretical. I wanted to put some of that theory into practice. I felt strongly about working with a smaller, more grassroots organization. But I realized I need to be part of a bigger organization with a broader impact. Glad you see yourself five years from now. Well, eventually I'd like to work in the press office. Why the press office? Because that's where the greatest impact happens. That's how people all over the world learn that human rights violations will not be tolerated. Well, I must say, Matt, I'm impressed. It was very nice to meet you. We'll be in touch soon. Let's break me in you. You could do that if you wanted to. Not if he doesn't think he deserves anything. Harping on his resume, you're just making things worse. No, the real problem is Matt can't work for a bunch of privileged first-worlders who use human rights as an excuse to slap the world around with their waxed own dick. Let's not get into that again, Matt. Did you see what he did there? Yes, I did. Now you try. I saw Jake do it, Dad. I got it. Now I'd like to see you try. So you don't have to do this, Matt, but that one. Oh, you can't come in like that. Like how? Your shoulders are hunched and you're not making eye contact. You need to walk in confidently and with your head up. Come in again. Much better. Nice to meet you. I'm Ed. Matt. We're in pancake. Very good. Sit down. So, Matt, tell me why you're interested in working for our foundation. Because Sam told me about the job. And how do you know Sam? We met at Harvard. No, actually, in Ghana. We were both at Harvard at the time, but we were doing our year abroad in Ghana. So we were in Ghana when we met. And what were you doing in Ghana? Well, at least in my case, I was teaching a bunch of people something that they didn't want to know. And I didn't know how to do, and they didn't want to learn. Oh, come on. I'm sure you're underselling yourself. No, I felt like an idiot, and the worst part about it. Well, why don't you tell me a little bit about how you got here from academia? Oh, well, I wanted to put theory into practice. Can you be a bit more specific? There were things I wasn't smart enough to figure out in academia, so I'm trying to figure them out in real life. How can you say that you're not smart? It's not that I'm not smart. It's that I'm not smart enough. I don't know, maybe nobody is. I'm afraid I don't understand. What were you trying to figure out? How to be useful, how to not make things worse. Matt, I see from your resume that you have a lifelong commitment to social justice. With your background and all these references, why haven't you done anything useful? I don't know. Dad, Matt's interview skills aren't the problem. He's trapped in a sick way of thinking. Drew, stop helping. You're not a good ass. Wait a minute. I've just been sitting here. I've barely said anything. All I'm trying to do is help. Yeah, by continually insisting that there's something wrong with you. Because I care about you. I'm just trying to be useful. That's it. What's wrong with that? You're not happy. Don't you want that? Honestly, Drew, everything is fine before you guys got here. So you were loving doing temp work. It's a decent organization. Somebody has to do what they have me doing. And you want to keep doing that forever. I can't do it forever. It's a temp job. Jesus. Nothing escapes this vortex of negativity. Matt's not negative. He's not lazy. He doesn't lack self-confidence. He's not afraid to risk. You, believe a guy like you, is supposed to sit down and shut the fuck up. Nobody's ever told me to shut up. Of course not. Because you've always done such a good job of taking the backseat. All your female and queer and minority co-workers probably don't even know you're there. You're being an ally, putting yourself in a service position, right? Making copies for the oppressed? You're trying to live in accordance with what you believe. What's that? That people like us can do. That people like us, that there's nothing people like us can do in the world that isn't problematic or evil. So we have to make ourselves invisible. People like us? What's that supposed to mean? Oh, you know, privileged white dickheads. Women and minorities may get to pretend they're doing enough to make the world a better place just by getting ahead, but a white guy is pretty hard to press to explain why the world needs him to succeed. So Matt's trying to stay out of the way. Jake, you keep saying this, and I find it very hard to believe. It's because nobody else would ever do it. Matt's a freak. Jake! Imagine as a compliment. It's a world of pigs, and that's not a pig, but if you're not a pig, you're fucked. Well, look at me. I'm an asshole, but people kind of like me whether they know it or not. You're not as big an asshole as you think you are. Yes, I am. My companies run almost entirely by white guys, and I do nothing about it. I make ironically racist jokes. I give straight guys shit about being gay. I talk about which one of our interns I want to fuck. As much as I'd like to bring someone other than a white guy that client meeting, the clients don't want it, so I don't do it. Together with my ex-wife, I'm raising our kids to be as white as possible, except for when their blackness makes them more appealing tokens. So it's good to know that Matt is out there doing what he thinks is right, being a martyr, so I don't have to. That's not what I'm doing. Yes, yes, you are. You're making sacrifices for people who are other. But what are they sacrificing to make the world better? Nothing. They don't want you. They don't even want each other. They want me. Jake, I don't believe the things you think I believe. Maybe I used to, but what do you believe? I don't know. I don't know anything. So you don't even have your fucked up principles? You're a loser for no reason? Hey, you might as well be dead. Jake, stop. What? Three days. I have had to incessantly think about what a horrible person I am for not being a martyr like Matt, only to find out he's not doing anything other than being a loser piece of shit for no reason, reaffirming the total hopelessness of everything Matt, I want to kill you. I want to kill you. I am going to kill you. Kill me. I'll pull you. Kill your brother? Fucking kill me. Your candidate will conduct a public interview with Young Jin Lee. The interview will be followed by a Q&A. Please help me welcome our interviewer and our guest of honor, who flew all the way from Stanford for tonight's event, the 2018 Booth Award recipient, Young Jin Lee. Hi, everyone. I'm going to go ahead and just out myself as a Young Jin Lee fan girl. I'm completely a biased interviewer here. So we'll just put that out there. Your work has been really important to me as a PhD student, but also as a person that's alive in the world with thoughts and feelings and experiences. And I know that that's the case for a lot of us in this room right now and people in our department that aren't here today. So as a result of that, I've reached out online for students to put together questions. So a lot of these are mine, but a lot of them are coming from the student body. A little bit more about my personal experience with your work as it leads into the first question I have for you tonight. I came to your work at a really difficult time in my life. I'm sure you get unloaded on like this all the time, but here we go again, right? I had just moved to New York City, and I was going to start this program, this PhD program. And my sister died. And it wasn't a huge surprise because she was struggling with alcohol, abuse, and substance abuse, and she was struggling with mental illness. But it was also the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And it put me in a really weird place to start a PhD program. I was just not really in a good emotional place and not really caring about anything, let alone theater and performance studies. And I have a good friend, Ricardo Montes, who's teaching at the new school now. I think you might know him or you've met him before. And he suggested that I go see her play, We're Gonna Die. He was like, I think this is what you need right now. And I was like, I don't know what I need right now, but it's probably not theater. And I went, and he was absolutely right. I mean, not only did that play draw out the deep sadness of morbidity and sort of death and tragedy, but it also makes light of it. And there's humor and there's beauty and it's universally human. So I was really glad to see that Diana Owen and Matt Parker gonna play that song for us at the end of the night today because that's the song we chose to have at my sister's funeral service. So it was very important to me. We did it on a beach at sunrise in South Texas. So that it's very personal. And I'm so, so honored to be in your presence today. And I teach the play to my students and they love it. It's always their favorite play of the semester. So enough about me. In light of this, in light of this, that was intense. Sorry, but it's coming from the heart. I have been in such fear of this event because I like just the mere thought of the award makes me wanna cry. And so I was just like, I can't, you know, I can't just cry through the whole thing. And then like you just tell like the most heart-rending. I'm like, oh my God, just like deep breathing. We're so glad to have you here. And to kind of flip the script on this story I've just told you, is there anyone, any artist, any person that has sort of helped you get through difficult times, either creatively or personally? Oh man, this is like another crying topic. Okay, so yes, he's sitting right there. His name is Mike Ferry and he is my dramaturg of the past 15 years. And we met actually in our PhD program, at English PhD program at Berkeley and we both dropped out. And we have been working together ever since. He's worked on every single show with me just side by side. And as many of you probably know, when you are trained as a critic and in that critical mindset, it's very, very difficult to then cross over into the creative because you are trained to basically be a huge jerk. You know, towards creative things, right? And so like when you're creating a work of art, in the beginning, it's always bad. I mean, I guess I hear sort of mythical tales of writers who just like wrote the most famous play ever in one week, but I sort of don't believe it. Like I believe that they, you know, that there was development happening during the rehearsal process. So like, but, you know, but for me in particular, the beginning stages of writing, the writing is so bad and just the critic in me is so completely vicious with that poor little artist who's just trying to take her first baby steps into this project. And so Mike, you know, he does so much, but like one of the huge things that he's done is basically, you know, I don't think I could have done it without him, like shut off the viciousness of that critic brain. And, you know, he has just, he has sort of like, you know, the most empathy of anybody I've ever met and he really just helped me, you know, to survive. I mean, I can't tell you how many, oh man, it's not even bad at the beginning. Like it's bad for years, you know, like the shipment, you know, we heard that amazing testimonial to the shipment. I mean, the shipment, the first two workshops that I did, I mean, the first one in particular was so racist and horrible, like not even like, you know, controversial, like it was just flat out, just racist. And we did not intend it, but it was. And I just remember the horror of like, this mostly white audience just roaring with laughter and sort of like, you know, engaging in, you know, sort of feeling like they were being given permission to engage in this like super racist stuff. And then like, you know, the black friends and relatives of the cast members like walked out, you know, completely upset from the theater. And, you know, and this type of thing goes on sometimes for a really long time, you know, where it's just really bad for a while. And so Mike, you know, I just don't know what I would do without him because he's just so, so completely good at his job and so good at keeping the project on track and so good at keeping sort of as much as possible, like my ego out of the way. Well, we're grateful for Mike, too. So as your Facebook friend, I have been at, we're Facebook friends by the way. I have a, and now everyone knows that, so I feel really good. I've noticed that you network a lot with all sorts of really interesting artists and activists and scholars on Facebook. And another colleague in the program, Elise and I were talking about how we love your Facebook page because there's always like juicy things going on there as some sort of relevant discourse, which looks totally different from like most pages that you go on. So how do you view your relationship with social media and I see you as using it as sort of a crowdsourcing way of working through stuff, but maybe I'm wrong. How do you view the way that you use it? Well, a lot of times, I mean, the way that I work is just so intensely collaborative, so like Mike is sort of like my main person, but then there's the cast and then there's everybody involved with the production, there's assistant dramaturgs, my associate director, like there's all of these people who are just intensely involved in the creative process with me. So I'm used to when I'm writing, when I'm directing, just having a room full of people with me at all times and everybody is just shouting stuff out and it's just tons of feedback all the time and we invite people into the room and they shout out feedback. So it's just constant, this sort of cacophony of information that I have become very used to like filtering and Facebook is when I'm just alone trying to write by myself and I don't have that room full of people around me and Mike's at work and I can't text him, then Facebook actually functions very similarly to that rehearsal room where I just ask a question and then immediately I have all of these really smart responses and so it's really like having a very diverse group of collaborators that I can call on and before 11.9 when our current president was elected, it was much more oriented towards the just the collaboration and working on things and since that has happened, I have been, I was just so distraught by that event in part just because it was a terrible thing to have happened but also just thinking about how little I had been thinking during the Obama years, like just how uncritical I was, just how I was not paying attention to what was going on and how I was just thinking like, oh, well Obama's president, so I don't have to care about what's happening in the world and I think that was the thing that I felt the most terrible about and so since then I have been really making such an effort to know what's going on and to question more and to be more critical and that journey has been sort of a parallel track on Facebook that is sort of starting to dovetail with my work now but for a while it was just sort of distress and trying to be a better citizen. Thanks for that. So tying into your use of Facebook, one of your posts talked about your complicated relationship with academia and I hope what we hope with this event is that you do realize that your decision to focus on your work has been incredibly valuable to people in institutions and beyond so we're glad you made the decisions that you did but playing, it's kind of come full circle now because you're a professor, you're teaching and playing to our audience here, I'm curious of what is your teaching style and do you have any juicy student stories or anything like that? Well, seeing as how this is being live streamed, it's probably not a good idea for me to, if I want to continue teaching to expose my juicy teaching stories but for me, academia was, I've actually like based on a recent Facebook post about academia, I've learned that there are academics whose minds just love to push themselves to the extremes of abstraction, right? Like where it's just like there's all of these systems and your brain sort of holding them all in place at once and it's just so many degrees removed from anything you can actually hold. Like it's just so purely intellectual and I have encountered people who just love that experience and for them, I mean, I think one woman said that she can't boil an egg but she can do that. So for her, that act of like going into like level after level of abstraction feels natural and like something she's competent at but pretty much anything else in the world would be difficult, you know? And so I am definitely not that person. I'm probably the most like I'm very, very extreme opposite to that in the sense that if something isn't practically applicable, I just have a very hard time wrapping my mind around it. And so for me in academia, it was this very strange experience of I would read this stuff and I would like listen to people talk and then I would just sort of say stuff that sounded, you know, I'd be like, okay, these are the words that you use and like what's a crazy way of using those words that like just doesn't make any sense and everybody would say like, amazing, like that's so interesting, you know? And at the time I was like, what is going on? Because these were very smart people who were doing, and like they weren't like these jerks who were just pretending, you know, like it wasn't an emperor's, well in some cases I think it might have been other people like me who didn't know what was going on but there were people who were just like, they could take my nonsense and actually map it in the grid of the abstraction because that's how good they were, right? You could just say something that just a string of nonsense words and they would be like, I am now mapping it in the grid and this makes sense. So, but for me I didn't have the grid and I didn't understand what anybody was saying and I felt stupid. And also just like a lot of the rhetoric of criticism is sort of, you know, this is why my argument is better than all, like all these people are old fashioned and racist and you know, like they're bad because their arguments are stupid but then here is my argument that's really smart and here's all these other smart people that support my argument. And so that was kind of like the rhetorical framework of the thing, you know, which is, and it's just a rhetorical framework, like it's just this practical thing that people use in order to justify their positions, you know, like, because I mean, I don't think, like most people probably don't actually believe like my idea is the most or maybe some people do but I, but for me it was just, I'm so literally, I'm so literal minded. So I was like, when I was trying to write my dissertation and really when I tried to write anything I was like, oh my God, like I have to make the most true best argument that has ever been made about this and I don't even know what that is and I don't, you know, and it was just so terrible. And so like eventually I had to drop out and I had, I was such a devoted academic. I mean, I think that's something that people don't know about me was that like freshman year I was just like, I wanna be a Shakespeare scholar and I devoted myself. I mean, I studied so hard, like all the way through undergrad. I went straight through into grad school, like I was like a research assistant to Stephen Greenblatt, like I did my honors thesis with him and I, and I, and it was just, I was very, very serious about it and it was just very heartbreaking to me that I was too stupid to continue. I mean, that's really what it felt like. And so when I left it was just probably like the biggest heartbreak because it, you know I had devoted, because I was ABD, you know I went through orals, like I did my prospectus conference I was like working on my dissertation and just the level of failure that you feel when you've devoted your entire adult life to pursuing a dream that you then just can't execute because your brain, like you don't understand, you know and also here's the other, here's the other fun thing. Here's the other fun thing, which is that not only, like so not only am I stupid, like it's like the reason why I'm stupid is because I'm evil because I'm so, you know because I'm so committed to like the heteropatriarchy you know, like the white heteropatriarchy and I want language to be this way and I want to talk about beauty and so I'm evil and so that's why I'm stupid and so that was sort of like how I left grad school in shame and then it was in this mindset that I was trying to then be an artist and like, you know, I was just like this sort of like brutal attitude towards myself where I am then trying to like create so that was a very difficult process but I have noticed that, you know I'm now in drama department theater and performance studies, I mean I do think that and I've now like read the criticism that has been written about my work, you know for example by Kieran Shimokawa and it's written mostly by theater and performance studies people and I can understand the articles and they don't have the like I'm the genius over all these stupid people like it's just, it's a very different type of thing from what I was, you know, doing in the 90s so now, you know, I think that, you know being in these departments, I mean still like I'm, you know, I'm at Stanford and you know all of the tenure track faculty like they're all like academics, you know but you know and I'm coming in as a practicing artist but it is, I don't know like I mean I'm definitely, you know I always sort of the way that I've tried to avoid students feeling alienated the way that I felt alienated is I will especially for freshmen and sophomores were just coming in and they, you know they haven't learned a lot of the vocabulary that is, that gets used in these academic settings I'm very adamant, I'm very adamant about babbling you know by which I mean when people just talk without trying to communicate and I'm very strict about spacing out and those two things go together I'm like I'm gonna control the babbling but then you have to control the spacing out because if babbling is happening like of course you're gonna space out like that's the only defense against babbling is to space out but if the babbling doesn't happen then you can't space out and you're also not you're not allowed to, you know not ask what something is if you don't understand what it is and so like all of these things I have like very strict rules about making sure that people understand and I'm always like looking around and I'm like do you understand what I'm saying you know I do that constantly I'm like does everybody understand and I'm like looking into their eyes suspiciously and everybody's like yes, yes, we got it Great, I think we all wanna take your class now so one of my favorite shows is just a completely pivot one of my favorite shows of yours was Untitled Feminist Show and it totally electrified me and I'm curious what you see your responsibilities as a playwright is advancing the project of feminism in light of the Me Too movement and intersectionality and things like that that we're actually talking about right now You know, Untitled Feminist Show I'm working on, I'm finishing up a script of it now which is gonna be published with Straight White Men this at some point this summer and I'm really excited about it because it's a show that doesn't have any dialogue in it and it's all basically stage directions and movement and you know, the cast and I like we made the decision to put the word feminist in the title just to as a sort of public embracing of feminism but that show is actually not it's not really about feminism it's I don't think it's really advancing feminism like that is basically like, you know we were trying to make, you know I don't know, like I feel like there are entertainments there are like popular Disney type of entertainments like maybe like a child's response to Disney on Ice I guess that's what I was looking for with Untitled Feminist Show which, you know, didn't go over that well with the you know, the super like boundary pushing, you know experimentalist where they were just like this is like Disney on Ice for feminist but it was great, you know, like these lesbian couples in their fifties would come and they would have their arms on each other just be like laughing and they did seem like they were watching Disney on Ice for them, you know it was just like laughing and having a good time like this was not boundary pushing art this was not feminist boundary pushing art like it was just, you know I just wanted to make this gender fluid good time and that was that show and we just said it was feminist because we felt that, you know creating a space for gender fluidity was a feminist act you know, and we just wanted to put that but that actually ended up getting us into trouble just because, you know, the word feminist comes up and then automatically it's like what's your thesis? What's your thesis about feminism? That's the best thesis in the world that's ever been you know, that's ever been thought of and it's like, I don't know So I want to kind of turn to straight white men because I would hate to neglect them in this interview but kind of tying that in with the untitled feminist project and what you're showing what you're talking about with gender Q and Kim who's one of my colleagues here she noticed that you modified and I have to read this because it's kind of complicated that you modified the earlier character of the stage head in charge in the play to two characters and that you said that they should be played by gender non-conforming performers preferably of color and the performers playing person in charge one and person in charge two should be empowered to say whatever they want to audience members can you tell us a little bit about that particular change and that choice? Well in the original production that we did at the public there was only one character who was performing all of that and we spoke to the performer Elliot Genetopoulos and there's something about being one that feels a little bit tokenizing where it's just like, oh, there's just one person representing all otherness for this show and to have two people sends a little bit it's like, it's not just one person like there are more, there's more than one person and they also were able to and another change that we made is that they interact with the audience before the show and one person takes one half and the other person takes the other half and also like another change is that they position the actors into the scenes and for me those characters were important because the public theater was my first kind of non downtown space and I have a lot of audience younger audience members like a lot of queer more diverse audience members who I was just afraid that they would walk into the public and the audience would be so sort of middle class and older and whiter and they would feel like they didn't belong there and so that's why we blasted this hip hop music which I noticed that you guys blasted the hip hop on the way in and it was like specifically hip hop by female rappers with like very raunchy lyrics and people think that I put that in just a torture the regular audience, the public audience members but I absolutely did not like it was actually meant to be like a nice thing like a welcoming gesture to to people who were not of the main demographic and also that was the purpose of the two people in Chargent and also like I felt that for me gender non conforming trans characters were important to the play because I feel like that yeah I feel like those identities are you know are still like too invisible in the world of performance and I think that you know for you know probably for the people in this room you know it wouldn't be that big a deal you know to see like a transgender non conforming person sort of you know emceeing or hosting an event but for a lot of the audience members in the spaces where this show is being done I think it is you know a little bit mind-blowing so that's you know that's always kind of a line that I'm trying to walk where like there's one group of people where it's just like pretty much anything you do they're gonna roll their eyes you know because they've just like seen it all and like everything's cliched everything is you know is boring and then on the other hand unlike on this other side is you know when I did a show at Steppenwolf in Chicago I was told pretty definitively by like a lot of people who were locals that the majority of my audience would not have ever heard the word privilege used in the way that it gets used these days among you know you know among academics and artists they would have heard it in terms of like oh he's very privileged meaning he comes from a lot of money but they would not have ever even thought or heard of the concept of white privilege and I refuse to believe this actually like I was like this is impossible and then everybody you know all the you know everybody went and like they asked their grandparents and their parents and you know they said have you ever heard this term and they were like I don't know what you're talking about so there's this whole audience whose minds are like can be blown by like almost anything you know like if you just introduce the tiniest thing so it's just sort of trying to get this group of people to understand that you know like you know that I'm also sort of kind of interested in you know what happens with this group over here does that make sense? Totally and congratulations on your success with the play by the way and it's about time that we have an Asian-American woman playwright on Broadway so we're all excited to go see that. Well I mean one thing I have to say really quickly about that though is that you know there's this sort of idea that somehow the doors of Broadway have generously swung open to include me you know to include an Asian-American female actually that's not what happened this woman Carol Rothman who's the artistic director of Second Stage which is a non-profit theater she bought like she had the theater by the smallest Broadway house on Broadway so that she could put whoever she wanted there so I have basically been forced upon Broadway by this incredible person and theater. Great, we wouldn't have it any other way. So just sort of on that topic can you tell us more about this production's journey from its beginnings I think it started as a workshop piece at Brown and then it came here to public and there's a whole bunch of places in between in Chicago and now it's going to Broadway. Can you tell us about some of the challenges and maybe what's changed about the piece? Oh naturalism is really really hard to write. It's you know because I always used to think that just naturalistic plays were bad you know because I saw so many of them and now I know it's just because they're so hard to write because you know in a naturalistic play any tiny thing you change is gonna affect like a hundred other things in the play it's not like that in experimental theater at least not for me you know you can change something without everything just collapsing and so it's just very very like slow painstaking methodical work and you have to care a lot about character I don't care at all about character so that is a huge challenge for me with naturalism and my dramaturg Mike would constantly be like why does this character do that like why does this happen I'd be like I don't know I don't care and be like you have to figure it out and I'm like I'm not interested in that like I just want him to do a dance now and he's like no like in naturalism like you have to there has to be something he wants and I like I don't care what he wants I'm like don't why are you talking to me like this you know and so that was basically the process of making straight white man fantastic well on that note we're going to open it up for questions from the audience and when you do ask a question into the microphone can you hold it like really close to your face because this is being live streamed so we care about that but yeah any any questions my name is Heather and I'm here in the program and we've kind of crossed paths a couple times I was at TCG and you left and anyway I saw songs of a dragon here and then I was in Berlin when you were touring it there at HAL and I just wanted you to talk if you would about your international reception oh yeah so the my identity politics shows have been very popular in Europe and at the bar afterwards I always sort of get the same response which is like oh it's so it's so hilarious how you Americans have all these race problems like in Europe like we don't have these problems at all you know like you like they're watching some sort of you know you know some sort of like rare zoo exhibit of race problems you know and you know in the meantime like their whole you know their whole you know Middle Eastern kitchen staff is like so enraged all the time like over you know like we're in the cafeteria and they're like telling us how racist everybody is at this theater and how enraged they are all the time so we actually there are in the shipment at least like there's like an insert for European audiences where like in the stand-up act the stand-up comedian like you know targets something directly at European audience members so I mean that's been sort of the biggest thing that I've noticed is just you know a real delight in sort of engaging with a piece of art that concerns race without having any idea that they also have a relationship with race in their own country. Hi, I'm Nick and I'm also in the program. I hope you'll forgive a semi-theoretical question. I'm struggling between two of them and I guess I just have to pick one. I guess so your work deals a lot with issues that are political. Do you think that there is an imperative for artists to deal with political issues or is that just something that interests you? I think you know I've made plays that deal with identity politics and I've made plays that really don't like we're gonna die is one that doesn't that's sort of purposely as sort of generically human as I can make it. I mean I, so I'm sort of obsessed with this communist rapper named Boots Riley right now who he just had a film at Sundance that's gonna be coming out soon that I'm really excited about and he has a very interesting theory about how all of the communists from the old days when communism was strong in the US and people like we're literally card-carrying members of the Communist Party that in the aftermath of McCarthyism they all fled into academia and the arts and so now we've got all of these universities and all of these nonprofit organizations and we've got all these artists who are just all the radicals are just as radical as can be and yet academia and the arts are not they're not well equipped for actual organizing as you can tell from like any graduate students who attempt to strike anywhere like it's very challenging and so I guess where my thinking is now is that I think that it's great if people can make art that makes people feel very strongly about things that are happening in the world and that can make people angry about injustices that are happening like I think that art is very good at doing that art is good at depressing people and making them mad about things that they should be mad about and that they should be depressed about but when it comes to like actual change I sort of think that having some sort of community organizing practice is sort of like Booth Riley says, like that's the most important thing for an artist, for an academic, for anybody is to have some sort of practice where you are organizing people to basically withhold your labor because that's sort of the only power that we have right now so I guess my answer to that would be I think that it is it is, it's awesome if you're an artist and you can make this work that gets people emotional and riled up about things that we need people to be riled up about but if anything's actually going to happen I think, because like our demonstrations are going unheard, like there's, it's I don't know, I guess I agree with Booth Riley that withholding our labor, figuring out how to tie that to tie the withholding of our own labor not only to the circumstances of our own working conditions but also to causes that we believe in, that that's sort of like our only source of power right now and so I guess that's my thinking. Anyone else? I just wanted to go back to your hi, I'm Margaret and I'm also in the program, hello. I just wanted to go back to your pedagogy statement about babbling and spacing out. Did you mean you're babbling and they're spacing out or they're babbling and you're spacing out or both and how you, and if it's both kind of how you're circulating that or dealing with that? I mean, everyone's gonna babble, you know like that's just sort of human, you know like I think it's very difficult not to babble at all and I think that if you are so restrictive that you're wearing, you're just like I am not gonna babble a single word of babbling then you're just not going to speak. So it's not really that you're not allowed to babble, it's more just like if you have this idea in your head that you're not supposed to speak without trying to communicate a point. I think that's what really rains in some of the really bad babbling, you know which is when people just range from topic to topic to topic to topic and they just get further and further away from what the point is. And yeah, I think, is that answering your question? Is that answering your question? Like I don't know if that's... Oh, yes, there definitely is. And I think this is exactly the kind of conversation that I have with my students actually, you know which is you bring up some rule and then there's like immediately 20 different reasons why that rule is a problematic rule. And so, yeah, like that's absolutely right. I think that babbling is useful. I think that we do do it, but I do think, I guess what I would say is it's very useful to say in a room there's no babbling because it gets people to be a little bit more aware of what's happening in the room. And is this, this is a graduate level seminar? No. This is under, this is under, because I wish my undergrads would babble more in silence. Are there any other questions? Do we have time for one more, Hansel? Yeah, Keon. Hi, I'm Keon. I'm in this program and Ryan Donovan who's also in our program asked this question in our own life space and I seconded it. So I'm asking this question on behalf of him. So you made most of your work public in your website, the recordings of it. And I want to hear more about how you decided to make that public. Oh, well, I closed down my company, within the past, about a year ago, I made the decision to close down the company. I had been writing, directing and producing my own work for about 13 years. And it was just being an artist and running a business is really difficult. And it just didn't make any sense anymore. And so when I closed down the company, I wanted to make the work accessible to people who would not otherwise be able to see it. And actually you can make so much money off of DVD sales from academic because universities will just pay like $500. Like, oh, that's the price. Like, okay, we have the budget for that. So there actually was a sort of, for a while we were making money off of universities selling the DVDs. But I realized that I wanted, I had this pipe dream of some kid in a small town somewhere stumbling upon it. And getting to see it without having to go through any, without having to pay or anything like that. And so, and actually on the boards who recorded the video of the shipment, they were amazing because they are selling, that I mean, they shot that to sell. So they're selling it on their website. And they let me put it on my website for free even though they're still selling theirs just because they're so awesome and they're so artist friendly and they just got it. And accessibility is actually something that I worry about a lot these days because with my company we would tour around to these very sort of high brow venues like the Pompidou in Paris and you'd get all of these intellectuals and fancy people. And when I was interested in reaching people who weren't just that. I know a lot of us use those resources in our classroom so we're very grateful for that as well. Thank you so much for this public interview and for being here and receiving this award. We are just so happy to have you here. And a round of applause for young Jane Lee. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Q and Kim. I have been teaching speech communication at Barwick College for two years. So I guess I'm supposed to be very good at public speaking by now because I always emphasize how important it is for my students. But just to be very honest with all of you, this is my first speech of commemoration. And I'm so honored and glad that my first testimonial is dedicated to you, young Jane Lee, my longtime artistic and academic inspiration. I first saw young Jane Lee's performance in April of 2013 with Hansel at the intimate theater space at Tucson Art Center in Seoul. We were about this distance back then too, but that time you were on stage wearing your signature navy sweater and yellow pants, performing We Were Gonna Die as a part of theater festival. I was just a 23-year-old MA student in the English program at Career University who was also interested in writing a dissertation about Shakespearean performance. And I sang along with you, I'm gonna die in the auditorium. I would never have imagined that one day, five years later, I'd be recounting that moment in front of you and in front of all my colleagues and in front of all the rest of the guests tonight at the Booth Award. Now I'm the third year doctor theater student here at the Graduate Center. And again, you have become the first Asian-American woman playwright whose work is to be produced on Broadway soon. After almost three years of theater going experience in New York, I've learned that, how liberating and how rare it is to have strong female presence on stage and also off stage. Like you, like Diana O here today and like all my colleagues who performed or organized this event today. I do not want to label or limit your achievement by calling you simply an Asian or a Korean-American or even a female artist. As you also said in a recent interview with Rich Smith that, and I'm quoting, just the mere fact of my contributing to diversity and Broadway is not enough. But I do appreciate your direct and playful challenge of the stereotypical representations of Asians or Asian-American identities, which can never be separated from gender and power dynamics. In Songs of Dragons, Flying to Heaven, one of the characters named Korean-American says, and I quote, have you ever noticed how most Asian-Americans are slightly brain damaged from having grown up with Asian parents? Asian people from Asia are even more brain damaged, but in a different way because they are the original monkey. As an original monkey by which I mean Asian, Korean, female, non-US and international student, I'm so excited to see how embracing of my own identity would help me through my academic journey. Your work and career has taught me not only to reflect on the westernized education I received back in Korea in English department, but also to unlearn the white male gaze inside me and also to challenge and complicate the white male narratives in arts and academia. But I admire you more because your work is not only limited to Asian or Korean perspectives. As you're not afraid of exploring the identities beyond your own and bold enough to play with identity politics. When I applied for the PhD program here, I wrote in my personal statement that, and I read, witnessing Young Jin Lee's theater company's work as a starting point, I will further delve into playwrights and theater practitioners whose work extends beyond the confines of their own ethnic, racial, or cultural backgrounds. I sometimes feel really pressured to represent Korean theater or Asian theater because that's what people in the U.S. often expect to hear from me. But you give me your courage to keep moving on and do what I love to do beyond the narrow confines of what we call identity. Let me conclude by sharing a moment I encountered in my first year. I was writing a paper on your play, Lear, in Professor Marvin Carson's contextual and intertextual studies in drama class. As some of you might already know, Young Jin Lee's Lear is an absurdist, funny, serious mixture of Shakespeare's King Lear and Sesame Street. And more than halfway through the play, Paul, the actor playing Edgar, removed Edgar's false mustache and beard and speaks directly to the audience, saying, and I quote, what are you doing with your life? Every minute, every second of the day, this is your one chance. What are you doing? What are you doing here? Is this really what you want to be doing with your life? Being here, doing this? If not, then go, run, run away and do something better. Paul asks the light operator if they can bring down the stage light and remains offstage for at least a full minute. When he comes back, he remarks, and I quote, we shut out people's pain when we are not in pain ourselves. This part struck me then and it still resonates me a lot. Not only because it made a striking transition from the Elizabethan tragedy to the stories of our lost pain, remembrance and responsibility in the play, but even more because it questions our own existence, purpose of living, the meaning of life, the meaning of living the life you want to live until we're gonna die. Sometimes, whenever I feel like an imposter in academia, as many of women and people of color often do, I go back to this passage, think and even dream about running away to see if there's something better than being in theater or in classroom. But I find myself always returning to theater, to home like this moment, because that's where we do not shut out other people's pain. And your work has taught me that theater is where we find joy, even in the moment of despair. We can dance crazily like the characters in straight white male, even in the moment of depression and where we can learn that we're gonna die, but keep moving on to live the life fully. Yongjin, you taught me to embrace my own identity, but only to transcend it. Congratulations again on receiving the Booth Award. I can't wait to see you. I can't wait to see where you will be in five years and I hope our path will cross again. Thank you all for listening and I hope you enjoy the moment. Thank you. It is now my great honor to welcome back of our guest of honor, Yongjin Lee, and present her with the plaque as a commemoration of tonight's ceremony. Lastly, we have a special guest performance. Diana Oh and Med Park will be performing A Song from Yongjin's Cabaret piece, We're Gonna Die. I remember so distinctly, like the thing that stays with me forever is how Yongjin Lee danced in it. Like that's the thing that's with me forever. Did that happen for anybody else? Or is it like, no? We were just really distinct like this thing. And then she's like, recover and do like a hair thing. Cool. So, this is Matt Park. Hi Matt. Hi. Hi, I'm Diana. Hi, Ann. Hi. And we are clearly two people and not a full band. So we're gonna cover the shit out of this song. And we decided that, yeah, that, I mean us coming together to put this cover together, we're like, yeah, we're gonna be a punk band. And our punk band is gonna be called Cute. Look at the gift you gave us, Yongjin Lee. Great. Okay, let's do a vocal warm up because we're all missing together by the end of this, right? Okay. You're all sheep. Okay. Oh. How are we with line checking? Line sound. Gonna die someday then I'll be gone and it'll be okay gonna die gonna die someday then I'll be gone and it'll be okay gonna die gonna die someday and it'll be okay gonna die someday be okay Someone will miss me, someone will be so sad It's gonna hurt so bad Someone will miss me, someone will be so sad It's gonna hurt so bad Gonna die, gonna die someday Then I'll be gone, and I'll be okay I'm gonna die, gonna die someday Bye someday Miss me, someone will be so sad It hurts so bad Someone will miss me, someone will be so sad It hurts so bad But we can't keep each other safe from harm We're gonna die, we're gonna die We're gonna die, we're gonna die We're gonna die, we're gonna die We're gonna die For joining our celebration this evening on your way out Please consider buying one of our new DTSA tote bags Which help raise money for events like this And we'll have a reception upstairs in our theater program green room So please follow our students to upstairs And yeah, please join us for refreshments And we hope to see you next spring for the 37th annual Booth Award event Thank you!