We're Gonna Die

Young Jean Lee

Jul 2015 · Theatre Communications Group

About this ebook

"Sly, weird, and thoroughly winning . . . Bracing, funny, and, yes, consoling."—The New York Times

"Young Jean Lee will give you whiplash. Her ability to stake out aesthetic territory and then abruptly abandon it makes her unpredictable; her tendency to excel at each new genre makes her terrifying. In the enormously touching cabaret-style We're Gonna Die, Lee jettisons everything that has armored this au courant young playwright against the world. . . . Lee purchases our hearts with her bravery's own coin."—Time Out New York

Inspired by her personal experiences with despair and loneliness, the Obie Award–winning playwright-provocateur and her band Future Wife create a life-affirming show that anyone can perform, about the one thing everyone has in common: we're all gonna die. Each book includes a CD of all six songs and eight monologues performed by David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, Adam Horowitz, and others.

Young Jean Lee has been hailed as "one of the best experimental playwrights in America" by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her other plays include The Shipment, Lear, and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award.

About the author

YOUNG JEAN LEE is an OBIE award-winning playwright and director who has been called “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. She has written and directed nine shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays have been published by Theatre Communications Group (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays, The Shipment and Lear) and by Samuel French (Three Plays by Young Jean Lee). She is currently under commission from Plan B/Paramount Pictures, Lincoln Center Theater, Playwrights Horizons, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College. She has received grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Creative Capital, NYFA, NEA, NYSCA, the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Rockefeller MAP Foundation. She is also the recipient of two OBIE awards, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2012 Doris Duke Artist Award.