We're Gonna Die: Young Jean Lee reminds us of all the tragedies we've survived before

One of the world’s most exciting playwrights distils our great fear of tragedy into the minutiae of everyday resilience

Hidden away on a corner of the internet is a video I have returned to time and time again: a 2013 recording of Young Jean Lee’s play We’re Gonna Die. I’ve been spending time with it again these past few weeks.

A short 50 minutes, We’re Gonna Die is about exactly that: the inevitability of what we will all come to face. It’s nothing groundbreaking in its production: it’s a simple, multi-camera filming of a downtown New York gig-theatre show. But perhaps at this time, this is what we need. Just the small beauty of simple things, of heart and soul and humanity before everything else.

Lee is one of the world’s most exciting playwrights, and here she distils our great fears about tragedy into the minutiae of the everyday. To do this, she crafts a series of monologues and songs about “really ordinary, comforting things”: stories of tragedy and pain, and the modest ways we get through them.

The beauty of theatre has always been in its collective experience of space. As coronavirus has shut down every theatre in Australia, I’ve found what I am grieving most is not the art I won’t see, but the people I won’t share that experience with. As much as we can all connect on the internet to talk about the latest streaming mega-hit, those global conversations can’t replace the unified intake of breath in a theatre.

But there is something so tender and precious about We’re Gonna Die that, perhaps, being alone in your home is the perfect context to watch it.

Sometimes, all you need are those reminders that things can be bad. That pain isn’t unusual. That tragedy will reach us all. The enormity of what we are facing right now as a global community is unfathomable; but it is just as important to remember and acknowledge the small ways we are hurting, too: the lost sleep, the loved ones across suddenly uncrossable state and national borders, the disappearance of physical touch.

We haven’t faced this kind of grief before. But we have faced grief and tragedy, heartache and pain. We have not survived this before. But we have survived everything so far.

The pain we are feeling now is still just the normal, everyday parts of being human. Death is coming. Horrible things happen. But when we acknowledge this instead of running from it, we can live our best lives. Lee embraces her audience in this space of pain and uncertainty and tells us: it will be OK.

We’re Gonna Die isn’t an anthem for the end of the world. It’s a hymn to the inevitability of hardship and grief and death. To the ultimate mundanity and ordinariness of these events.

The times we are living through are in no ways ordinary. And perhaps that is why I feel even more acutely comforted by our more dull, everyday lives existing simultaneously. And they will continue ahead of us forever, until, one day, we die.

“I’m gonna die / I’m gonna die someday,” Lee sings. “Then I’ll be gone / And it will be OK … Someone will miss me / Someone will be so sad / And it’ll hurt / It’s gonna hurt so bad.”

I always find comfort in Lee’s reminder of our capacity for endurance, and her hope. As a world, we’re in uncharted territory. As individuals we can get through this – because, in smaller but no less real ways, we’ve got through it before.

Watch Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die on Vimeo

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJulocG2vsRoaWlqYGS6or6ObGdor5Wnsm6zzqelmmWUnrJuxc6upaBlmpqur3nLnpxmqpWitq%2Bw0masrGWfm3qiuMtmq6GdXam%2ForPEnaCeq12ssrexjKysq66Zq7KlecGenaiqlQ%3D%3D