Straight White mentee
Terrifying Young Jean Lee uses straight white male characters to highlight the deep fears of failure to achieve what others expect of us and a weakness that we don t want to overcome that runs in all of us The characters are charming funny goofy and very loving They remind me of my own brothers Actually this whole family dynamic reminds me of my own and I don t like it No siree The love there is between family members the crushing the blow is when one of them decides to give up It s easy to think there s no plot until the last part especially if you don t pay attention to what the characters are feeling This is a play that I would love to see a performance of Straight White Men Lee s dramedy will be staged on Broadway this fall in a production sure to get noticed since it stars Tom Skerritt and Armie Hammer and will also mark the first production by an Asian American female to be staged on the Great White Way pun intentional So while that alone lends it some cachet the piece itself is certainly an odd one Lee is known for her avant garde stylings but this is largely aside from some meant to be jarring surrounding elements a naturalistic family drama investigating the privilege that both supports and undermines the titular characters It centers around the Christmas get together of an aging father and his three 40 something sons Hammer will apparently play Matt the oldest of these a part he is about 15 years too young to portray convincingly The problem is that the play meanders and skirts around the central issue which is that Matt seems to have been rendered inert by his rejection of his male privilege but that really doesn t become apparent until literally the closing moments of the play that end scene would probably make for an interesting OPENING scene to a much better script Straight White Men This comedy by Young Jean Lee has been making the rounds for the past couple years in major cities and I believe it has come up for a major award s recently which is how it came to my attention. Straight White menquadfi vis Lee looks into the heart of a family of white men at Christmas their strange rituals their familiar cruelties their tendency to coordinate attacks their blind support for one another A father and three grown college educated sons meet to share the holiday eating take out Chinese in new flannel pajamas sitting side by side on a too small couch and teasing one another mercilessly They are so white Young Jean Lee examines how aware these men are of their whiteness privilege and opportunity in their own society by having one of the brothers Matt not fulfill what the others think is his role but also we discover his birthright Having someone look closely at white ritual in America could be a harsh experience but Lee makes it silly funny and mostly non threatening while raising important questions around what constitutes privilege and how far each of us as individuals should go to erase ignore eliminate those special rights granted to the majority class Matt is smarter than the others has the best education and had the most promise He is the one doing the least moving and shaking amongst the brothers We are a little surprised to find they resent that pulling back and insist he carve a productive role for himself in society But Matt is troubled by all that he sees and knows and tries everyday to find his way in a society that doesn t make much moral or ethical sense. Straight White menxeed As a theatre piece the play runs about an hour and a half Most of that is taken up with the weird behaviors of white American men in exclusive and close proximity to their families We know there is something we are meant to see though the guffaws and foolishness because of the starkness of the title and because one of the men begins to cry less than halfway through This can t be right we think. Straight White menquadfi vis The ending and the final pages come as a shock then they are so profound There is nothing you can do to erase the problem of your own existence the youngest and brightest among them claim their mother would have said Do not despair and keep searching for answers is the advice from one who has loved them It seems like very good advice indeed Straight White Men fucking cool framing with the suggestion of poc trans actors as the guides keepers emcees of the story but i don t know if it is incorporated throughout the bulk of the script enough to really be effective especially as they don t give any sort of closing remarks dunno there s also really nothing in terms of a plot and the ending made me just feel like shit not like i learned so much but hm its always hard to tell what the final impact would be for me through text alone Straight White Men I mostly read this script today and I m not sure what it was trying to accomplish While Straight White Men does accomplish sympathetically dissecting straight white male favoritism privilege from the perspective of an AAPI woman I m not sure what its end goal was and what I m supposed to take away from it The play didn t really get going until the second act and by the time I began resonating with characters nothing really got resolved Straight White Men
| Straight White Men By Young Jean Lee |
| 082223596X |
| 9780822235965 |
| English |
| 74 |
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When Ed and his three adult sons come together to celebrate Christmas they enjoy cheerful trash talking pranks and takeout Chinese Then they confront 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 MenI d like to see this staged and then stay for the conversation afterward There are many things in this play but what struck me most was the freakishly stagey and performative nature of straight white masculinity tropes Straight White Men Loved this addition to Lee s growing body of work As with her other plays Lear for example she balances alienation and poignant compassion I love this about her work she always makes me see things from my life with a new perspective the way a portrait painter might make a picture of a celebrity not to make something strange recognizable but to make something recognizable strange This is what makes her plays so uniquely cathartic this mix of the utterly recognizable and the odd. Straight White menyoo In this play Lee presents a very recognizable straight white middle class world but since we are so used to seeing fictional white men represented in ways that dignify their psychology in its always taken for granted always respected complexity over capturing their culture as it is seen by an outsider it feels strange But I love how Lee completely captures those aspects of white male middle class culture that are so distinctive and strange their constant roughhousing the perpetual one upping off kilter humor the way their father showers them with gifts Lee also gives us believable psychological portraits in the midst of this particularly in Matt Matt is just a middle aged man taking exactly as much as he can take from the world honestly and no He s not doing this as his brother Jake insists because of noble moral principles he s just trying to be a normal person who does not misuse the system in the name of getting ahead The hilariously inside out dilemma in the play is that his family want him to take are in fact repulsed that he will not take Drew wants him to become self confident really selfish by doing therapy Jake wants to provide him with a moral high ground via the philosophical defense that he s purposely dismantling his own privilege And his father representative of the older generation wants to pay his loans for him and wants him to stop doing the type of housework and care taking that he the father finds repugnant exactly the type of work that his late wife and Matt s mother would have done and that would have seemed to the men perfectly natural for her to do There are so many fascinating wonderful scenes in this script My personal favorite is when Jake demonstrates to Matt how to sell himself well which Jake does naturally while Matt is completely unable to Jake and the father talk about selling yourself as if it s just talking up your good qualities but the very first thing Jake says to sell himself is I heard about the post from Sam Selling yourself isn t about talking well it s about making use of your connections acquired through privilege Matt won t do this because he is honest and he knows that having a connection does not mean he deserves or is qualified to do a job he doesn t have Well To sum up I enjoyed this play it made me think and I continue to be a huge Lee fan Her courage she always writes plays about stuff she s afraid of or uncomfortable with stands out here as always Straight White Men Initially I was confused by Young Jean Lee s Broadway debut play As I was reading I kept thinking straight white men don t act like that Then I began to think that was the point In undoing centuries of cultural appropriation from the hegemonic class this play is inverting the lens to the group that did most of the appropriating By the time I got to the third act I was less sure of that interpretation but invested in the characters and their classic crisis of masculinity An interesting read if you re invested in representations of gender and whiteness but not as scathing a critique of race and economics as other works such as Fairview Sweat or Claybourne Park Straight White Men Beautifully written and filled with several surprises This play will provide the reader so much to discuss and think about Straight White Men Holy crap what a great play One of my colleagues at work was just in a production of this and I unluckily was unable to see him in it luckily he lent me his copy of the script Absolutely fascinating so much to think about with this one needs to be digested and discussed Straight White Men.