The director Young Jean Lee not only deals with a wide range of sociopolitical issues, but also casts them in very different theatrical forms. While her “Untitled Feminist Show”, that billed at the 2012 steirischer herbst festival, was set in the realm between queerness and neo-burlesque, in “Straight White Men” she now embarks on the opposite road with a linear narrative structure, a realistic stage set, and a traditional performance scenario: set in a living room somewhere in a US suburb, a father and his three middle-aged sons must tackle a seemingly simple question: “What can a privileged, heterosexual, white man do to fight against the continued existence of an unjust system?”
In “Straight White Men” Young Jean Lee combines essential questions of artistic design and formal strategies with an analysis of heterosexual white men whose world status is beginning to sway. The piece presents its characters at a key moment in time when the wish to do “the right thing” and adapt to new social rules collides with the need for self-fulfilment – and an age-old male self-image is subjected to close scrutiny.