Playwright Young Jean Lee wants to 'destroy our preconceptions' of black identity with The Shipment

"Destroy the audience!" That's the motto of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company. Dubbed "the queen of unease" by the Village Voice and "a troubling, necessary presence" in American theatre by the New Yorker, Lee is one of the most exciting and adventurous playwrights working today. She's also the first Asian-American director to ever have her work premiere on Broadway.

She joined q's Tom Power to tell us more about her play, The Shipment, which looks at black identity.

"It's a show that I made with five black performers," said Lee. "I sat down with them and I asked them what kind of show [they'd] like to be in... If anything happened in the script that [they] didn't want to do, we would change it. It was this really unusual process where the actors were really steering the ship, and I was writing and directing in service to them."

The SpeakEasy Theatre's production of The Shipment is on now at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver. It opens tonight and runs until Oct. 5.

Download our podcast or click 'Listen' near the top of this page to hear the full conversation with Young Jean Lee.

— Produced by ​Ben Edwards