“Pretty Woman” comes to Broadway, Armie Hammer stars in “Straight White Men,” and Chukwudi Iwuji plays Othello in Central Park.
Illustration by Petra Eriksson
The thought of Young Jean Lee on Broadway is enough to boggle the mind. The forty-three-year-old playwright is one of downtown’s most trenchant, least crowd-pleasing talents, whose stubbornly genre-resistant work melds identity politics, Dadaist humor, and metatheatrical mind games. “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven” (2006) was a self-excoriating satire of Asian-American stereotypes. “Untitled Feminist Show” (2011) explored gender expression using six nude actors and minimal text. “Straight White Men,” which played at the Public Theatre in 2014, is a kind of topsy-turvy inversion of a naturalistic drama, written by someone who is neither a straight white man nor a naturalistic playwright. Second Stage brings it to the Helen Hayes this summer (starting previews June 29), with direction by Anna D. Shapiro and a cast that combines Broadway star power (Armie Hammer, Josh Charles, Tom Skerritt) with Lee’s avant-garde milieu (the transgender performance artist Kate Bornstein).
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