ABSTRACT
The concept of ethnic masculinities is surely just as slippery as all the categorizations that our society loves to indulge in, and the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender have found a fertile playground in the American theater. Straight White Men is a family play, an arena that places Esther Kim Lee squarely in the tradition of American theater that boasts so many plays that are "set in and around living rooms, the most common and persistent setting in contemporary American theatre". However, Lee's objectives do not appear to be quite the same as those of, say, white, male dramatist Tracy Letts in August, Osage County, a Pulitzer-Prize winning realistic family play that damns all women. Lee's acerbic vision of society and life does not allow her to create positive all-round characters, men or women with whom people could comfortably share their lives.
