Critic Walks Out on Young Jean Lee's THE SHIPMENT, Reviews It Anyway

Celebrated playwright Young Jean Lee (pictured), whose controversial work includes STRAIGHT WHITE MEN and UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW, has certainly received a few negative reviews throughout her career, but presumably they've come from critics who have respectfully stayed for the entire production.

As reported on the website Indy Week, earlier this month theatre critic Pamela Vesper walked out after the second scene of the Black Ops Theatre Company and Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern's production of Lee's THE SHIPMENT, performed at the Common Ground Theatre in Durham, North Carolina.

Reporter Byron Woods writes, "Though she shared a byline with writing partner Kurt Benrud, Vesper was the sole author of the review published next day in the newsletter Triangle Review and reprinted on the website Triangle Arts and Entertainment."

THE SHIPMENT, which the playwright describes as "a black identity-politics show," workshopped in New York in 2008 and has since been seen in theatres throughout the United States, as well as across Europe and in Canada and Australia.

The review, which was removed from the website and replaced with an apology, described the first thirty minutes of the play as "insulting filth" and concluded, "This is not art; it's elephant dung." Written in the first person, it was clearly stated that the critic walked out.

Indy Week quotes Little Green Pig artistic director Jaybird O'Berski as writing, "This is the kind of review we live for, and it proves an essential point about Young Jean Lee's excoriating comedy: we are still petrified to talk about race in America."