Young Jean Lee habitually sets out to challenge herself and her audience. With The Shipment, she throws down the gauntlet to herself as a Korean-American artist to make a theatre piece about African-American identity and experience, and dares us to… what? To move past aggressive accusations of racism in a mock-stand-up sequence? To consider seriously the implications of the glib final twist in a more or less naturalistic drama that takes up the latter half of the 85 minutes? To be disconcerted out of our preconceptions?
    
The last, I think, is the true case. Yet a number of Lee’s strategies, as enacted by her five-strong African-American cast, are counterproductive at least some of the time. Direct accusations are more likely to provoke a combative response from us in self-defence than to stop us short. Adding an extra two or three lines to relocate a routine to England does not likewise translate the landscape of racial experiences or the listening culture of the audience. Behaving at some moments as if basic observations of difference obviously aren’t racist and at others as if they plainly are may be intended to confuse us into interrogating the whole concept, but in practice it just appears muddled and incoherent. The “minstrel show” format of the first half is not sufficiently strongly established to make a generic, stylistic point, and the second half’s drama seems incomprehensible in whatever racial context one mentally places it (although more trite in some than others). At bottom, Lee relies on the goodwill of the audience to want to be put on the spot; this constitutes a kind of licence that’s entirely at odds with the in-yer-face superficial attitude of the show.
    
An early version of this piece was apparently abandoned when predominantly white audiences took its urban dance stylings at face value and, gasp, enjoyed them. The challenges in the current incarnation are far more direct and explicit, and some of them are challenges which many of the press-night audience (myself quite possibly included) will have flunked. It contains another challenge, however, to Lee and her performers: to consider the possibility that this version might not work any better after all. In the end, it’s no more incisive than the mock-Muppets in the musical Avenue Q singing bouncily that “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist”.
    
Written for the Financial Times.