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Why does The New Yorker love to write about articles re: race &

identity, or on the perspectives of non-whites in America? I...
Saffron stag film
  10/29/14
...
Saffron stag film
  10/29/14
Cb they're Shitlibs why else
Carnelian church building
  10/29/14
Do you understand why they are called "social justice w...
Chestnut incel pit
  10/29/14
They also LOVE the Middle East for some reason. Apparently ...
Canary Sweet Tailpipe Roast Beef
  10/29/14
Why are you picking out the New Yorker? Pretty much every n...
insanely creepy toilet seat
  10/29/14
...
Saffron stag film
  10/29/14
...
Saffron stag film
  11/08/14
This was an interesting read. Why don't you direct or star i...
Stimulating piazza pisswyrm
  11/08/14


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Date: October 29th, 2014 1:13 AM
Author: Saffron stag film

identity, or on the perspectives of non-whites in America? I'm a non-white myself but why the FUCK does The New Yorker feel this shit is worth writing about? Are they trying to show-off how OPEN-MINDED they are? These articles feature sub-par writing and ZERO insight.

Said articles are nothing more than compare-and contrast, pure insignificant juxtaposition; They are usually about some minority who talks about what it's like growing up with minority parents with values that are DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED to WHITE-ANGLO-SAXON AMERICAN values. Then said minorities feel "uncanny" in America as a result.

FOR EXAMPLE:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/03/real-gone-girl

musty late-spring evening in Manhattan, 2012. The voluble and irrepressible playwright and director Young Jean Lee swivelled in her seat to take in the audience. The Korean-born Lee, who is now forty and has made a considerable name for herself on the downtown theatre scene, was far from her professional home. She was, in fact, on Broadway, at the Walter Kerr Theatre, on West Forty-eighth Street, waiting for a performance of Bruce Norris’s Pulitzer Prize-winning hit “Clybourne Park” to begin. Looking over all the middle-aged, suit-jacketed men and their well-heeled lady companions around her, Lee sort of shivered and said, “But everyone’s so old.” Although Norris’s play about convention, class, and race touched on themes that Lee had broken down and pieced back together at odd angles in her own work, his relatively traditional naturalism was a far cry from her irreverent, essayistic, collagist approach to storytelling, which makes her, for a range of theatre critics and audiences, a troubling, necessary presence.

In her feminist-minded works, in which characters sometimes talk more to the audience than they do to one another, Lee had built drama around racially driven self-hatred, the naked body, and patriarchy, among other things. Now she wanted to write a different kind of play: a naturalistic work like Norris’s, on the subject of straight white men. In short, she wanted to create art about something that she did not entirely understand in a genre that she hadn’t fully explored. (The result, “Straight White Men,” premièred at the Wexner Center for the Arts, in Columbus, Ohio, in April, and will make its New York début at the Public in November.)

Walking through the neon delirium of Times Square after “Clybourne Park,” which she pronounced “good, in terms of, you know, being a play, with a beginning and end and all,” Lee explained, “I’ve found that the only way to make theatre that gets the audience thinking is when I feel uncomfortable making it.” She paused in front of Lace, a cavernous “gentleman’s club” on Seventh Avenue. “A titty bar!” she exclaimed loudly. The burly, bald bouncer stationed out front looked down at the source of all the noise—a hundred and twenty pounds, asymmetrical haircut—and said nothing. “A titty bar,” Lee said again. “If I’m gonna be a straight white man, I’m definitely going to have to go to a titty bar.”

Lee’s imagination is associative. Her work is, for the most part, fuelled by memories and the associations they inspire. While those memories are often painful, they are part of the solid ground her characters stand on. And yet, for a long time, Lee didn’t feel as if she were on solid ground herself. Her parents, James and Inn-Soo Lee, were born into a turbulent, divided Korea, and immigrated to the United States in 1976, when Lee was two years old, so that James could earn a doctorate in chemical engineering. Growing up in the small town of Pullman, Washington, Lee, unlike her father, was an indifferent student. Not engaging in school was, perhaps, her way of not dealing with the casual and not so casual racism that was directed her way by the predominantly white students there: if she didn’t excel, she wouldn’t risk standing out, being seen. But, at the University of California at Berkeley, where she majored in English, she worked with the Shakespeare scholars Stephen Greenblatt and Stephen Booth, who recognized her gifts. As a graduate student at Berkeley, Lee began a dissertation on “King Lear.”

Four years into the project, she got married. She was twenty-six and was beginning to feel undernourished in the academy—a strange thing for the daughter of immigrants to admit, even to herself. She felt frustrated, too, in her marriage. One day, her therapist asked her to say, off the top of her head, what she wanted to do with her life, and Lee replied, “I want to be a playwright.” “It was just like saying that I wanted to be a clown or a skunk,” she told the director Richard Maxwell, in a 2008 interview. Lee’s therapist asked her to try to recall when that dream had been planted. “And all of a sudden,” she said, “I remembered that in this tiny little town in eastern Washington where I grew up we had this horrible summer-stock theatre, where they did musicals like ‘The Sound of Music’ and ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.’ . . . I remember being a little kid and going to see these plays and just having that be the best, most magical experience of my entire life.”

In 2000, Lee’s husband enrolled in Yale Law School, and they moved to New Haven. Feeling her way toward her new ambition, Lee looked up all the playwrights who were teaching at the Yale School of Drama, read their work, then contacted the one whose writing she considered the weirdest—Jeffrey M. Jones. Jones pointed her to the experimental theatre space PS122, in the East Village, to the Wooster Group, and to the work of Richard Foreman and Richard Maxwell. Watching these and other artists, Lee knew that she wanted not only to write her own plays but also to direct them—all in a bid to control her own vision. But what was that?

In 2002, she started in Mac Wellman’s prestigious Master of Fine Arts playwriting program at Brooklyn College. There she learned some valuable lessons. Her first semester, she had a script due, and she found herself desperate to write something as “cool” as the works she admired by Maxwell and Foreman, but was unable to produce anything that she thought was strong. When she explained her plight to Wellman, he suggested that, instead, she write a script that she didn’t want to write. So Lee asked herself, “What’s the worst possible play I could write—the last kind of play I would ever think about writing?” The least cool thing she could come up with was a play about the Romantic poets, whom she had always disliked. “It was such a pretentious, horrible idea for a play,” she said. “The Appeal” (2004), a brief, intense comedic drama, is divided into glistening, shard-sharp scenes in which Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Byron argue about writing and the imagination and furniture, and Dorothy Wordsworth chastises her brother (“You’re a total and complete fucking moron”) for not understanding anything other than language or himself. While the piece has echoes of Maxwell in its flatness of speech, the themes are Lee’s own. She calls “The Appeal” evidence of “my shame”—proof of her failure to write a play like those of her admired elders. Nevertheless, the cool people loved the play, and it was mounted at the Soho Rep in 2004, where it attracted attention not only for its script but for Lee’s skeptical but feeling directorial eye.

Two years later, Lee, who had separated from her husband, produced her first masterpiece, “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven,” which features four women, named Korean 1, Korean 2, Korean 3, and Korean-American. (A straight couple called White Person 1 and White Person 2 complete the cast.) As the play begins, the stage goes black and the audience hears, in the darkness, Lee and others planning how she will be slapped in the face for a video. After each resounding slap, Lee analyzes its impact; cruelty, like acting, can be rehearsed. Soon, the critical distance in her voice as she evaluates each slap and its effect as a theatrical device starts to make us feel worried, tense. Lights up on Korean-American:

KOREAN-AMERICAN: Have you ever noticed how most Asian-Americans are slightly brain-damaged from having grown up with Asian parents? It’s like being raised by monkeys—these retarded monkeys who can barely speak English and who are too evil to understand anything besides conformity and status. Most of us hate these monkeys from an early age and try to learn how to be human from school or television, but the result is always tainted by this subtle or not so subtle retardation. Asian people from Asia are even more brain-damaged, but in a different way, because they are the original monkey.

“We’re running a little behind, but we’d be happy to have our anesthesiologist put you under for a few hours, until the doctor is ready to see you.”

BUY OR LICENSE »

Ever since Amiri Baraka had a black male character tell a white woman, “I’ll rip your lousy breasts off!,” in his classic 1964 play, “Dutchman,” race politics has been one of the most incendiary subjects for the American stage—and one of the most interesting. Still, much of the discussion emerges as special pleading: I am this way because this was done to me. But Baraka elevated his portrait of black-male self-loathing to the level of poetry and ended up showing us how little difference there is in difference: the real issue is power. In “Songs of the Dragons,” Lee does something similar. She dissects herself—she is the smug “authentic” Koreans as well as the Korean-American, who’s always struggling to authenticate herself—in order to give voice to the questions that have plagued her since her youth: How can you be yourself in an adopted environment that considers your foreignness threatening? How can you value yourself as an intellectual without academic-white-male validation? Korean-American identifies herself as “white” in relation to her purely Korean sisters. She is not white enough, however, to identify with White Person 1 and 2 as they endlessly process their “problems.” Lee’s characters enact caricatures that are both funny and poignant, playing on what “Asian” means to non-Asian people. In one scene, Korean-American and Korean 2 play granddaughter and grandmother talking about Christianity, a dominant force in postwar Korean culture:

KOREAN 2: I needing talk to you about serious matter.

KOREAN-AMERICAN: Okay, Grandma.

KOREAN 2: I needing to talk about Jeejus.

KOREAN-AMERICAN: Grandma, please . . .

KOREAN 2: Myung Bean, try to thinking this way. Living in world is very difficult, so people working out system of happiness for thousand and thousand of years. Young people trying live whatever they like, figuring out their own way. But look what happen! No money, stress-out, health problem, disaster! . . . Being Christian has all solution handing down from generation to generation. Young people think you can drink wine, beer with your friend and it is casual, just normal thing . . . but beer has chemical, a bad chemical that going in your brain and make it sick. When you go to hell, your arm and leg twisted with fire that is burning, and you scream but nobody hears.

The assumption that Korean-American is going to Hell is one of many that she must live with. But her grandmother doesn’t get to have the last word. The white man does:

WHITE PERSON 2: You know what’s awesome?

WHITE PERSON 1: What.

WHITE PERSON 2: Being white . . .

WHITE PERSON 1: I guess I never thought of it. And when I do think of it I feel like an asshole.

WHITE PERSON 2: You shouldn’t feel like an asshole. Being white is great. . . . What are all the white things that are great? Snow. Marshmallows. Cream sauce. Paper.

WHITE PERSON 1: We’re not really white like that, though. I think I lost ten dollars.

WHITE PERSON 2: Oh shit, that sucks.

If the world sometimes “sucks” for a white couple, what is it like for “other” people? In 2008, Lee wrote and directed “The Shipment.” It premièred in New York, at the Kitchen, in 2009, and was one of the most astonishing creations I saw that year. Lee has said that the play grew out of conversations she had with young black actor friends whose likelihood of being hired for movie roles depended on how “black” or “street” or “real” they could act. (Like the filmmaker Mike Leigh, Lee works with her actors to create a script that is often partly based on their actual experiences.) “The Shipment” also riffs on the idea of black naturalism in the theatre—plays with self-sacrificing black mothers and rebellious black sons:

MAMA: Omar, wake up! Wake up! You have to go to school so that you can be a doctor!

RAPPER OMAR: I want to be a rap star!

MAMA: I worked three jobs and raised six children and ten grandchildren by myself so that you could be a doctor! . . .

RAPPER OMAR: I just don’t like school.

MAMA: Why.

RAPPER OMAR: Because it’s boring and hard and people shoot each other at my school.

MAMA: Maybe you should try hard like Frederick Douglass.

Unlike Korean-American, who wants to shed her ethnic identity, Omar wants to be more authentically “black,” a rap star, but he and Korean-American have to deal with some of the same hassles: those striving ambitious elders who want them to get there—wherever there is—by a traditional route. Omar is fine with being a stereotype, because, after all, what else is there? In our post-Sammy Davis, Jr., America, isn’t being black and successful pretty much synonymous with being an entertainer or an athlete?

In a review of “The Shipment” in the Times, Charles Isherwood, who has called Lee “hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation,” cautioned readers not to think that the work was only about identity politics; it was also about theatre. In the midst of various skits, songs, and dances, Lee included hints of a naturalistic play. She didn’t return to that idea for several years. After “The Shipment,” Lee put on a cabaret act titled “We’re Gonna Die,” which played like autobiography but was actually based on terrible stories that other people had told her, with a little rock and roll thrown in. She also wrote and directed “Lear,” a confused but nonetheless fascinating 2010 piece about patriarchy and, perhaps, her former academic influences. Next was “Untitled Feminist Show” (2012), another original, masterly work, in which Lee did away with language altogether: a group of nude performers struck attitudes and made pantomimes about how people view gender and their bodies and myth in the world.

In “Straight White Men,” Lee has moved on from the internalized view of white men she explored in “Songs of Dragons.” She has given the straight white male his own body and heart, though he is not entirely free of her distinctly political view. Nor should he be. The challenge, when Lee began writing “Straight White Men,” was to find a way to be both herself and not herself; that is, to inhabit the title of the work, its declaration and its challenge. The result is less pointed than “Dragons.” In the play, three brothers visit their widowed father at Christmas. Two of them turn on the third, whom they think of as lazy, soft, emotional—not white or manly enough—while their father encourages their ignorance and their lack of sympathy for one another and for the universe around them. In one profound scene, the brothers discuss musicals and begin to dance around their father’s living room, in a kind of awkward tribal rite—Neanderthals in pajamas.

As one of few Asian playwrights—let alone directors and performers—in New York’s theatrical avant-garde, Lee is subjected to expectations that are rarely imposed on her white male colleagues. They are free to make art—often in conversation with one another—while she is supposed to be a standard-bearer for a culture that she does and does not feel a part of. Unlike the Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang, who creates well-crafted entertainments that show us something about Asian-American life from the inside, Lee’s goal is to question what the inside means. But she doesn’t stop there. For her, writing about Asian life, or about white American men, or about black life and speech from the perspective of black performers, isn’t very different from writing about eighteenth-century English poets: ultimately, Lee is interested in bodies, how we perceive them and how we inhabit them and how they are misshapen by eyes and minds that are not our own. Like the iconoclastic Cuban playwright María Irene Fornés, who, in a number of ways, is her predecessor, Lee doesn’t sacrifice her ethnicity for her art. Indeed, she sacrifices nothing; bodies, voices, jokes, food, tragedy, cities are all artistic fodder, as are her various selves and the mirthful, bloody life of her imagination.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26607053)



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Date: October 29th, 2014 1:15 AM
Author: Saffron stag film



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26607074)



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Date: October 29th, 2014 3:10 AM
Author: Carnelian church building

Cb they're Shitlibs why else

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26607533)



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Date: October 29th, 2014 3:13 AM
Author: Chestnut incel pit

Do you understand why they are called "social justice warriors"? They think they are fighting for justice

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26607536)



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Date: October 29th, 2014 7:29 AM
Author: Canary Sweet Tailpipe Roast Beef

They also LOVE the Middle East for some reason. Apparently no other countries are worth writing about.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26607855)



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Date: October 29th, 2014 11:38 AM
Author: insanely creepy toilet seat

Why are you picking out the New Yorker? Pretty much every non-explicitly right-wing media source is run by shitlibs who can't write about anything outside of their theological perspective.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26608498)



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Date: October 29th, 2014 10:10 PM
Author: Saffron stag film



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26611752)



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Date: November 8th, 2014 12:32 AM
Author: Saffron stag film



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26672454)



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Date: November 8th, 2014 12:50 AM
Author: Stimulating piazza pisswyrm

This was an interesting read. Why don't you direct or star in an off-Broadway play, OP?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2712698&forum_id=2#26672611)