The jokes on you, cracker mothafucka, and look who's laughing.

Saw YJL's The Shipment.
I say without reservation that Young Jean has a remarkable capacity for and agility with words, and a unique brand of wicked American humor that is based on irony/sarcasm. She also always goes after a disarming rhythm in her plays, one that teases, caresses, then pulls the rug from out under the audience. Watching her shows is like being tickled and being force-fed sliders while also being bashed in the head at the same time.
Though performed by an astoundingly beautiful and talented cast, I don't know if this was her most successful piece. Despite the NYT, I would say that the second half of the piece (which felt me like the play she really wanted to write) didn't earn its pay-off -- it's an extended cocktail party drama in which the host pretends to poison all his inane guests. The joke is supposed to be on the audience at the end when you find out that the black actors were playing white (read: racist) characters the whole time -- but this conceit was pretty apparent from the get-go.
I always wonder why her plays are so in-your-face, like to the point of being abusive to the audience, especially white ones. It's like she's tapped deeply into the fact that white people love to have their white guilt pumped up and paraded around and shat on publicly, particularly if in the hands of a such a witty wordsmith, because then they can feel absolved yet claim to have acknowledged their deep-seeded inherent racism and elitism and be able to laugh it all off in a neat package. There's a lot of racial shock-value to be mined and she's got a mainline to it, for sure.
My favorite part of the play was a song at the center of the play that was sung incredibly beautifully by three actors. That felt like the (literal) heart of the play to me.