Cast Set for Young Jean Lee's STRAIGHT WHITE MEN at Kirk Douglas Theatre This Winter

Young Jean Lee's STRAIGHT WHITE MEN will have its West Coast premiere November 20 - December 20, 2015, at the Center Theatre Group/Kirk Douglas Theatre, directed by Lee and presented in collaboration with the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. The first U.S. performances of the play since The Public Theater presented its New York premiere last fall will feature a cast of Frank Boyd, Richard Riehle, Brian Slaten and Gary Wilmes.

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN features scenic design by David Evans Morris, costume design by Enver Chakartash, lighting design by Christopher Kuhl, sound design by Chris Giarmo and Jamie McElhinney and movement by Faye Driscoll. Mike Farry serves as dramaturg.

In STRAIGHT WHITE MEN, Young Jean Lee offers a traditionally structured take on the classic American father-son drama. Ed (played by Riehle) and his three adult sons come together to celebrate Christmas. They enjoy cheerful trash-talking, pranks and takeout Chinese, but find themselves confronting a problem that even being a happy family can't solve: when identity matters, and privilege is problematic, what is the value of being a straight white man?

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN is also the first Young Jean Lee production in Los Angeles since "We're Gonna Die," which "introduce[d] one of New York's most exciting experimental playwrights to Southern California" (Charles McNulty, The Los Angeles Times) in 2013. In August of this year, as part of the Meltdown festival curated by David Byrne, Lee performed "We're Gonna Die" with Byrne and her band Future Wife at the Southbank Centre in London. Byrne also performs on the "We're Gonna Die" album, along with Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, Laurie Anderson, Sarah Neufeld of Arcade Fire and others.

With each new work -- STRAIGHT WHITE MEN is her 10th -- Lee has explored a different way of relating to her audience. She experiments with theatrical forms in a continual effort to, in her words, "get past audiences' defenses against uncomfortable subjects and open people up to confronting difficult questions by keeping them disoriented and laughing."

Young Jean Lee is a writer, director and filmmaker who has written and directed 10 shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, and toured her work to over 30 cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group, "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays," "The Shipment and Lear" and "We're Gonna Die," and by Samuel French, "Three Plays by Young Jean Lee." She is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Lee has written a screenplay commission for Plan B/Paramount Pictures. Her first short film, "Here Come the Girls," was presented at the Locarno International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and BAMcinemaFest.

Lee is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Doris Duke Artist Residency, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant and the ZKB Patronage Prize of the Zu?rcher Theater Spektakel. She has also received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller MAP Fund, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Creative Capital, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Arts Presenters/Ford Foundation Creative Capacity Grant, the Barbara Bell Cumming Foundation and the New England Foundation for the Arts: National Theater Project Award.

Tickets are available online at www.CenterTheatreGroup.org, by calling CTG Audience Services at (213) 628-2772, in person at the Center Theatre Group box office (at the Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles) or at the Kirk Douglas Theatre box office two hours prior to performances. The Kirk Douglas Theatre is located at 9820 Washington Blvd. in Culver City, CA 90232. Ample free parking and restaurants are adjacent.

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN was co-commissioned by Center Theatre Group (with a CTG completion grant made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, The Public Theater, steirischer herbst, Festival d'Automne à Paris and Les spectacles vivants du Centre Pompidou. It was produced by Young Jean Lee's Theater Company.

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN was developed at Brown University's Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Providence, RI. Residency support was provided by the Park Avenue Armory, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Spaceworks NYC and Columbia University.

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