Young Jean Lee's LEAR Opens at Soho Rep, 1/14

Soho Rep, the eleven-time OBIE Award-winning, Off-Broadway theatre company, kicks off its 2009-2010 season with the highly anticipated World Premiere of LEAR, the most ambitious and visually opulent work to date by the celebrated playwright/director Young Jean Lee. Previews begin January 7th, 2010 prior to an official press opening of January 14th at Soho Rep.

With LEAR, Lee finds herself returning to her beginnings in New York theater. In 2002, Lee was a hopeful young playwright having just moved to New York - she had dropped out of the English PhD program at UC Berkeley, where for five years she toiled at her studies and was well into the writing of her thesis. The topic? Shakespeare's King Lear. When she arrived in New York, she applied for an internship at Soho Rep, where she eventually staged her critically lauded play THE APPEAL in 2004. Now, five years later, she's back at Soho Rep with a work they have commissioned - LEAR.

Following last season's hit THE SHIPMENT - which Charles Isherwood of The New York Times heralded as "a subversive, seriously funny new theater piece by adventurous playwright Young Jean Lee," and Hilton Als of The New Yorker called "ingenious...a radical bit of theatrical smoke and mirrors" - lauded playwright/director Lee, whom Time Out New York calls "one of the best experimental playwrights in America," stages a collision between Shakespeare's text and the most emotionally difficult experience of her own life: her father's continuing battle with a terminal illness.

Lee's LEAR focuses not on the aging Lear and Gloucester, but rather on their adult children who turned their backs on their fathers' suffering. Though intensely personal, Young Jean Lee's LEAR is a striking tragedy about despair, the end of life and familial piety.

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

Written and Directed by Obie Award-winner Young Jean Lee and choreographed by Dean Moss, the design team for LEAR includes David Evans Morris (Scenic Design), Roxana Ramseur (Costume Design), Raquel Davis (Lighting Design), and Matt Tierney (Sound Design).

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" (an anthology she edited with Mac Wellman), 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.

Scheduled January 7th through January 31st, performances of LEAR run Tuesdays - Sundays at 7:30pm at Soho Rep. (46 Walker Street - between Broadway & Church, 2 blocks south of Canal Street). Tickets are 99 cents for all Sunday performances, $30 for general admission and $40 for premium reserved seating and can be reserved by calling 212-352-3101 or by visiting www.sohorep.org.

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

 

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