LEAR Plays Final Performance on 2/14 at Soho Rep

Soho Rep's production of Young Jean Lee's hotly debated LEAR will close on February 14th.

Having already sold out the initial run before it opened, Soho Rep's premiere run of Young Jean Lee Theater Company's LEAR has garnered reactions at both extremes-positive and negative-that have only increased the demand for tickets. To be sure, the production has stirred a larger debate among critics and audiences about the nature and purpose of contemporary theater. 

In his review of LEAR, Charles Isherwood of The New York Times writes, "Certainly the playwright Young Jean Lee does not lack for chutzpah...[she] has written and directed a cheeky, freaky modernist gloss on 'King Lear'... From perhaps the most imposing something in the theatrical canon, Ms. Lee has constructed a big, fat nothing... Can this have been quasi-intentional, a concerted effort to obliterate meaning by scrawling graffiti on one of the theater's most profound texts? ... As the Elizabethans would say, huh?"

David Cote of Time Out New York writes, "The absurdist, meta-Shakespearean [Lear is] by turns irreverent, grotesque and morally harrowing. The writer-director and her outstanding actors plumb the depths of a bona fide existential crisis . . . Traditionalists, the folks who'd rather see a mediocre revival of a classic than the bracing premiere of a weird play, will label Lear an act of cultural vandalism . . . But Lee is one of the most vital, rewarding playwrights to arrive on the scene in the past decade. She has a flair for seductive, elliptical self-exposure that reminds you of Wallace Shawn, and her language has an intensity and slipperiness that commands attention . . . [Lear] has power and ought to endure."

Hilton Als of The New Yorker writes, "Young Jean Lee's LEAR (at the Soho Rep) is a hot mess, but it's the kind of misfire that any young artist is entitled to, especially if he or she aspires to greatness... What makes the conceit of her production so powerful-so fundamentally original-is the fact that she dispenses with the patriarch and chooses, instead, to wrestle with the souls of women in a manless land."

Sam Thielman of Variety writes, "Young Jean Lee's deceptively free-form LEAR starts out as a bug's-eye view of Shakespeare's great tragedy, exploring some of the Bard's pettiest characters as they pick at each other during the moments they're not onstage in 'King Lear.' But as the show moves forward, Lee uses that play and some beautifully unconventional additions to flesh out Shakespeare's themes of loneliness, mortality and filial responsibility in gratifying and moving depth."

And Michael Feingold of the Village Voice writes, "Lee's LEAR, it turns out, is indeed both inaccurate and distorted vis-à-vis the original. Its virtues come from its free-hearted willingness to pursue either path-inaccuracy in its version of Shakespeare's story or distortion in its effort to make that story fit the one Lee wants to tell... The zigzagging route she takes to this ultimate failure is full of exhilarating, illuminating moments."

Commissioned and workshopped by Soho Rep., LEAR features a cast which includes Paul Lazar, April Matthis, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pete Simpson and Amelia Workman.

LEAR is written and directed by Lee and has stage movement and choreography by Dean Moss. The design team includes David Evans Morris (Scenic Design), Roxana Ramseur (Costume Design), Raquel Davis (Lighting Design), and Matt Tierney (Sound Design).

LEAR marks the return of Obie Award winner Young Jean Lee to Soho Rep, where her play THE APPEAL debuted in 2004. Ms. Lee's most recent work in New York was last season's acclaimed production of THE SHIPMENT.

LEAR is a project of Creative Capital, which receives support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Ford Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the LEF Foundation, The Muriel Pollia Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, the TOBY Fund, the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, and more than 130 other individuals and institutional donors.

Young Jean Lee (Playwright/Director) has directed her plays at The Kitchen (THE SHIPMENT), The Public Theater (CHURCH), P.S. 122 (CHURCH; PULLMAN, WA), the HERE Arts Center (SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN), Soho Rep. (THE APPEAL), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS). She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, has done residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook, and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. Lee's plays have been published in "New Downtown Now", in "Three Plays by Young Jean Lee" (Samuel French) and in a collection of all of her plays entitled "Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays" (Theatre Communications Group). Lee is currently under commission from Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and is the recipient of a 2009 Brooklyn College Young Alumni Award, the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, and a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award. It has also been noted of Lee's work that "She offers the pleasure of brazen theatrical inventiveness." - The New Yorker and that it provides "the clearest indication that the avant-garde isn't dead, and has never been funnier." - New York Magazine. For more information on Young Jean Lee and Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, please visit www.youngjeanlee.org.

Now in its 34th year, Soho Rep.'s 2009-10 season is the third under the leadership of Artistic Director, Sarah Benson, and the second for Executive Director, Tania Camargo. Soho Rep. is dedicated to cultivating and producing visionary, uncompromising, and exuberant new plays. They perform to one of the youngest adult audiences in New York City, with over three-quarters aged 18-40.

Critics continue to herald Soho Rep. as the go-to theatre destination for new and original works. New York Magazine states, "this indispensable theater offers more excitement per chair than any space in town," Time Out New York says, "Soho Rep. is the best theater in NYC (official)," Variety exclaims "[Soho Rep.] has claimed an increasingly vital spot...the venue has suddenly become one to watch for Manhattan theatergoers starved for new work," and the New York Times declares Soho Rep. to be "one of the most daring companies."

Over the last decade, Soho Rep. productions have garnered eleven OBIE Awards -- most recently for Sarah Benson (director) and Louisa Thompson (set designer) for last season's critically acclaimed New York premiere of Sarah Kane's BLASTED; six Drama Desk nominations, two for BLASTED (Outstanding Director of a Play - Sarah Benson and Outstanding Actor in a Play - Reed Birney) and four for their critically acclaimed production of FRANKENSTEIN, the Oppenheimer Award for EVERYTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT, and two Kesselring Awards for Melissa James Gibson and Mark Schultz. In recent years, Soho Rep. has presented plays by established and emerging theatre artists such as Richard Maxwell, Mac Wellman, Young Jean Lee and The Flying Machine.

For additional information about LEAR or Soho Rep., call 212-941-8632 or visit www.sohorep.org

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