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Unsung Praises for Young Jean Lee’s “Untitled Feminist Play”

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There’s a new play by playwright Young Jean Lee called “Untitled Feminist Show,” which features six women who perform the entire play nude. Completely nude. “My jumping-off point for all my shows is like ‘What’s the worst idea I can think of?’ or like, ‘What’s the last show in the world I would want to make?’ And then I force myself to make that show,” Lee said. “Feminism – when I first had the idea for the show – really did seem like a dirty word.” Feminism has, indeed, been described as a “loaded term,” and even Lee admits that “It’s gone through this phase of people not wanting to be identified with it, and seeing it as this ’60s hairy armpit kind of thing.”

Lee grouped together a slew of performers to kick around some ideas, and it turned into month-long, six-hour chat sessions that kept returning to one issue: Young Jean Lee.”One of the big problems for us was the fact that because you are born with a certain type of biological body, it kind of dictates what is OK, how it’s OK for you to be,” Lee said. “The show is basically that,” she said. “What that looks like.” She explained that this idea was mind-bending to her because “while some people claim to have freed themselves from gender expectations, it’s very hard to do.” She retells a story of a male friend who found himself inexplicably enraged when on the subway a man sitting near him pulled out some wool and started knitting. So Lee …

… wanted to create a show in which nothing could be sexualized, but she soon realized that anything, even clothing could be sexualized.”Actually the least titillating thing seemed to be just to have them nude,” Lee said. “Their hair’s not styled, they’re not wearing makeup. They are just who they are.”

So, Lee wrote a script about women debating feminism and gender roles while nude dancers performed around them. It was funny and entertaining as a whole, but Lee said it didn’t work. People became angry at the debate, the over-stimulation of the nude dancers, you name it. So what did Lee decide to do? Lee decided to get rid of the talking. “The avoidance technique was to latch onto the text,” Lee said. “And once we took that out, people were left in this very emotional and intense place.” She found that this took away the distractions, and in fact, audiences in workshops forgot the nudity almost altogether and became fixated  upon the actors exploring ideas without words.

Drawing her cast from various parts of the New York performance scene with a burlesque artist, an actor, some and a variety of contemporary dancers – all representing all different shapes, sizes, and viewpoints, including on performing naked. “I mean, for some of them it is a huge deal for them to be taking off their clothes publicly. For some of them they do it in almost every show they do, so it doesn’t matter to them at all and there is no bravery required,” Lee said. “For other performers the nudity is not an issue, but the not having hair and make-up, that’s the terrifying thing.” The audience reaction in workshop performances has been run the gamut from laughter to tears. Some people just shut down, Lee said, but then contact her a week later saying they want to talk about what they had seen. Lee describes “Untitled Feminist Show” as the most difficult play she has ever done. However, she also says now when she walks down the street, she looks at the women around her in a very different way.


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