Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven smashes the conventions of Asian-stereotypes to bits and tosses them up like confetti. Young Jean Lee, one of the hottest downtown New York playwrights, turns the Asian-identity play on its head when a coterie of Korean American women explore what it means to be Asian in a white-dominated society. Music, Korean tradition, romance and violence flood the stage. The result is a Tarantino-esque collage of monologues, dances and scenes that is as sharp as it is hilarious.
2ndStage is Studio’s playground for emerging artists, offering innovative and thrillingly eclectic programming with shorter rehearsal periods and smaller budgets than our other productions, with a spirit of exuberance and experiment.
The inaugural 2010-2011 season of new Artistic Director David Muse was generously underwritten by Jaylee Mead, and Robert and Arlene Kogod, with additional underwriting from The Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation, Stanley and Rosemary Marcuss, and Vicki and Roger Sant.
The 2010-2011 Season of The Studio 2ndStage was generously underwritten by Don and Nancy Bliss and A. Fenner Milton.
Young Jean Lee was named by American Theatre magazine as one of the 25 artist who will shape the American theater over the next 25 years. She was born in Korea in 1974 and moved to the United States when she was two years old. She grew up in Pullman, WA and attended college at UC Berkeley, where she majored in English. Immediately after college, she entered Berkeley’s English PhD program, where she studied Shakespeare for six years before moving to New York to become a playwright in 2002. Since then, she has directed her plays at Soho Rep (Lear; The Appeal), The Kitchen (The Shipment), The Public Theater (Church), P.S. 122 (Church; Pullman, WA), HERE Arts Center (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven), and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals). She has worked with Radiohole and the National Theater of the United States of America. She is a member of New Dramatists and 13P, has done residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Hedgebrook, and has an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College.
She has been called “a rising star” by the New York Times and “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” by Time Out New York. Her plays have been published in New Downtown Now (an anthology edited by Mac Wellman and herself), in Three Plays by Young Jean Lee, American Theatre magazine, a collection of all of her plays entitled Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and Other Plays. She is the recipient of a 2005 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant, a 2007 Emerging Playwright OBIE Award, the 2007 Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a 2009 Creative Capital Grant, and a 2010 Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
(As of October 2010)
Natsu Onoda Power recently adapted/directed The Lathe of Heaven at Spooky Action Theater. Other recent credits include Alice in Wonderland with National Players; The White Snake at Baltimore Center Stage; Charm at Mosaic Theater; and Wind Me Up, Maria!: A Go-go Musical at Georgetown University. She is an Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and the Artistic Director of Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University. Ms. Onoda Power holds a PhD from Northwestern University, and is the author of God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post- World War II Manga (The University Press of Mississippi, 2009).
(As of April 2018)
CALIFORNIA: Memphis, La Jolla Playhouse; Paradise Street (world premiere), 99 Ways to Fuck a Swan (January, 2011), title3; Exile of Petie DeLarge, REDCAT @ Disney Concert Hall; Closer Than Ever, Lodestone Theatre. The Misanthrope, Medea, Pericles, Wildflower, Further Adventures of Suzanne and Monica, As You Like It, Picked, Good Breeding, University of California – San Diego/La Jolla Playhouse LOCAL: Maria, Like Art, The Young Cannonball, Young Playwrights Theatre, Youth Ink, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; The Anastasia Trials in the Court of Women, Venus Theatre; Liang & the Magic Paintbrush, Imagination Stage. FILM: Step Up, Parallology. TRAINING: M.F.A., University of California – San Diego/La Jolla Playhouse.
(As of October 2010)
LOCAL: The Taming of the Shrew, The Shakespeare Theatre Company; Urashima Taro, Source Theatre Festival; Stuart Little, Adventure Theater; Lesbian and the Flying Pig, Capital Fringe Festival 2007; American Rice, Discovery Theater; 365 Days/365 Plays, Venus Theatre; The Glass Mendacity, Diamond Dead, Landless Theatre Company; Cinderella Eats Rice and Beans, Imagination Stage; Thumbsucker, Spamlet, Cherry Red Productions. TELEVISION: The Wire, America’s Most Wanted. TRAINING: Terry Schreiber Studio; Gary Austin; University of Maryland College Park.
(As of October 2010)
NEW YORK: Iphigeneia at Aulis, Exit the King, The Pearl Theatre Company. REGIONAL: M Butterfly, Capital Repertory Theatre; Waiting for Tadashi, George St. Playhouse; Shedding the Tiger, Sacramento Theatre Company; Wit, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park; Burn This, Syracuse Stage. LOCAL: Hot ‘n Throbbing, Arena Stage; Children of Medea (Best of Fringe), Tales of Love and Sausages, Capital Fringe Festival. TELEVISION: As The World Turns; 24; Law & Order; Spin City. TRAINING: M.F.A., New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Acting Program.
(As of October 2010)
UNIVERSITY: The Demolition Downtown, The Bear, The Internationalist, The Vagina Monologues, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Metamorphosis, American Conservatory Theater – Summer Intensive. EDUCATION: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. TRAINING: American Conservatory Theater – Summer Intensive; The Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory.
(As of October 2010)
THE STUDIO 2NDSTAGE: The Receptionist. LOCAL: The Alchemist, The Shakespeare Theatre Company; Da, Olney Theatre Center; Born Normal, The Fifth Musketeer, The Capital Fringe Festival. REGIONAL: Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, Philadelphia Children’s Theatre Company; Once Upon a River, Hedgerow Theatre; Patter for the Floating Lady, Theatre Catalyst; Neighbor’s (World Premier), Vagabond Acting Troupe. TRAINING: M.F.A. in Acting, The Catholic University of America.
(As of October 2010)
THE STUDIO 2NDSTAGE: Reasons to Be Pretty. LOCAL: New Jerusalem, Theater J; The Glass Menagerie, In the Heart of America, Hamlet, Rep Stage; 13 Rue De L'Amour, Olney Theatre Center; Ambition Facing West, Theater Alliance; Dark Play or Stories for Boys, Marisol, Forum Theatre; Harvey, Apocalyptic Butterflies, Picnic, Bay Theatre. EDUCATION: B.F.A., Marshall University; M.F.A. in Acting, The Catholic University of America.
(As of October 2010)
Luciana Stecconi’s previous designs for Studio Theatre include The Effect, Cloud 9, Hedda Gabler, Bad Jews, An Iliad, Lungs, The History of Kisses, In the Red and Brown Water, The Year of Magical Thinking, Amnesia Curiosa, Souvenir, Contractions, and Crestfall, among others. She has designed for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Round House Theatre, Signature Theatre, The Kennedy Center Theatre for Young Audiences, Mosaic Theater, Theater J, Everyman Theatre, Olney Theatre Center, Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Georgetown University, Catholic University, American University, Imagination Stage, and many more. She’s the Assistant Professor in Scenic Design at Emerson College. Stecconi holds an MFA in design from Brandeis University and is a member of USA Local 829.
(As of December 2018)
BROADWAY: Soul of Shaolin, Marquis Theatre. NEW YORK: The Alice Complex, Cherry Lane Theatre; Nowadays, Metropolitan Playhouse; King Lear; National Black Theatre; The Stronger, ArcLight Theatre; Handball, Puerto Rican Traveling Theater; Stella Rising; The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre. AWARDS: Peggy Ezekiel Award for Outstanding Achievement in Lighting Design, The Caucasian Chalk Circle. EDUCATION: Ohio University, M.F.A in Theatrical Lighting Design.
(As of October 2010)
Elisheba Ittoop is a sound designer, composer, and audio producer. She returns to Studio having designed for The Big Meal, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, That Face, and The Receptionist. She has produced podcasts and written music for NPR, CNN, Audible, WGBH, Futuro Media, WFMT Radio Network and Glimmerglass Opera Festival, Wonder Media, Pinna, Three Uncanny Four, and others. Her sound designs and original music for theatre have been heard at The Kennedy Center, The Public Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, American Repertory Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, and many others across the country. She has created sound and music installations for the Bonnaroo Music Festival and the Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival. She has an MFA in Sound Design from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and a BFA in Theatre from New York University. elishebaittoop.com.
(As of February 2021)
Laree Lentz designed An Iliad for Studio Theatre and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven for Studio 2ndStage. She has also designed locally for productions including The Gift of Nothing, Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences; Tender Napalm, Signature Theatre; Romeo and Juliet, Folger Theatre; Stupid Fucking Bird, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; Never the Sinner, 1st Stage Theatre; Optimism! Or Voltaire’s Candide, Spooky Action Theater; Home of the Soldier, Synetic Theater. Other credits include designs for The National Academy of Chinese Theatre Arts Beijing, UNC Charlotte, and Central Piedmont Community College. Her upcoming work can be seen at Ford’s Theatre and Children’s Theatre of Charlotte. She holds an MFA in costume design from University of Maryland, College Park.
(As of April 2015)
THE STUDIO 2NDSTAGE: Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. NEW YORK: Romeo and Juliet, The Metropolitan Opera (upcoming). REGIONAL: Macbeth, Two River Theatre; The Three Musketeers, The Alabama Shakespeare Festival. LOCAL: Macbeth and Cyrano, Folger Theatre; The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Signature Theatre. AWARDS: S.A.F.D 2010 Swashbuckler of the Year. INSTRUCTOR: North Carolina School of the Arts, Summer Session. EDUCATION: North Carolina School of the Arts.
(As of December 2010)