We're Gonna Die

One of the most inexplicably pleasurable experiences of my theatergoing life . . . A goofily grim and oddly uplifting meditation by one of the most restlessly experimental--and wildly entertaining--writer-directors working in the theater today. - Adam Green, Vogue

Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation . . . A combination of pop concert and autobiographical lament for the human condition, We're Gonna Die's forthright acknowledgment that life can be a rough business is bracing, funny, and, yes, consoling. -Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

Drawing from true stories of people's experiences with tragedy, despair, and loneliness, Young Jean Lee creates a life-affirming show about the one thing we all have in common: we're gonna die. This book includes a CD of all six songs (performed by Young Jean Lee with her band Future Wife) and eight monologues (performed by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Kathleen Hanna, Adam Horovitz, Matmos's Drew Daniel, and Martin Schmidt, Sarah Neufeld, and Colin Stetson).

Young Jean Lee has written and directed ten shows in New York with Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, and her work has toured to more than thirty cities around the world. Her other plays include Straight White Men, The Shipment, Lear, and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Obie Awards, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Doris Duke Performing 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.