Critical Encounter Series: "'Enabling Violations': Race, Theater, and Experimentation"
A conversation between Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Founder of Fulcrum Theater and Young Jean Lee, Founder of Young Jean Lee Theater Company on the politics of race
and the state of liberal criticism.
Location: McCormick Hall 106
Date/Time: 04/03/12 at 4:30 pm - 04/03/12 at 6:00 pm
Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Center for African American Studies, Department of English, Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Program in Latin American Studies.
Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas is an award-winning playwright and the founder and artistic director of the Fulcrum Theater, an organization that helps to produce new work by playwrights of color – that is, by encouraging and supporting work that challenges those familiar demands on the staging of ethnicity. He trained with Maria Irene Fornes and Cherrie Moraga and is the recipient of numerous awards: include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; the Helen Merrill Award; Playwright of the Year in El Nuevo Herald¹s 1999 year-end list; a Writer’s Community Residency from the YMCA National Writer's Voice; and the Robert Chesley Award, among others.
His first play Maleta Mulata was produced by Campo Santo + Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. His second play Sleepwalkers was produced by the Area Stage in 1999, where it was awarded a Carbonell Award for Best New Work given by the South Florida Critics Circle. Sleepwalkers was further developed and remounted by the Alliance Theatre in 2002. Tight Embrace was produced by INTAR in New York, and his play Blind Mouth Singing completed runs at Chicago's Teatro Vista, and the New York based National Asian American Theatre Company. The Chicago Tribune praised these productions as having "visionary wit," while The New York Times named them "beautiful and strange".
His plays have been published by Playscripts and TDR/The Drama Review. He has been commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Repertory, New World Theater and Playwrights Horizons.
YOUNG JEAN LEE is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and was named by American Theatre magazine as one of the 25 artist who will shape the American theater over the next 25 years. She’s been called “a rising star” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two years old. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley’s English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at Soho Rep (LEAR; THE APPEAL), The Kitchen (THE SHIPMENT), The Public Theater (CHURCH), P.S. 122 (CHURCH; PULLMAN, WA), HERE Arts Center (SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (GROUNDWORK OF THE METAPHYSIC OF MORALS). Most recently, she wrote and performed in WE’RE GONNA DIE at Joe’s Pub, with music by her band Future Wife. 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. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now (an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself), in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee (Samuel French), American Theatre magazine (September 2007), a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group), and THE SHIPMENT and LEAR (Theatre Communications Group, June 2010). She and her company have been the recipients of grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MAP / Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Creative Exploration Fund, Tobin Foundation for Theater Arts Grant, Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation Grant, Arts Presenters/Ford Foundation Creative Capacity Grant, New York State Council on the Arts, the MAP Fund, the Greenwall Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her work has been invited to tour to venues in London, Paris, Vienna, Hannover, Berlin, Zurich, Brussels, Antwerp, Budapest, Sydney, Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim, Rotterdam, Salamanca, Toulouse, Chicago, Chapel Hill, Portland, Seattle, Austin, Philadelphia, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Boston, Williamstown, and Minneapolis. Young Jean is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Young Jean has taught master classes in playwriting at NYU/Tisch and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. She is the artistic director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for THE SHIPMENT, a recipient of the 2009 Brooklyn College Young Alumni Award, the ZKB Patronage Prize 2007 of the Zurich Theater Spektakel, a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award, a 2010 fellowship in Playwriting from NYFA, and a 2010 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Category: Event
Department: Center for African American Studies