Emerging playwright Young Jean Lee’s new work The Appeal (a historically inaccurate look at The Romantic Poets) opens April 9th at Soho Rep.

The Appeal is a sardonic take on the life of artists and the cliques that they form. It also ponders, in an ironic way, the big questions about art, life, meaning, memory and loss. Using the English Romantic poets as characters, Lee shows us Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy just hanging out and commiserating about poetry, life, love & art in England and in the Swiss Alps.

Culturebot was fortunate enough to see an early workshop reading of the play several months ago and found it alternately dark and hilarious, sometimes a little of both. I don’t want to give anything away, but imagine the movie Gothic, with the poets as slackers and dialogue by Beckett. Well, actually, maybe the dialogue is more like Hal Hartley. Actually, there’s probably a much better example that is escaping Culturebot’s overloaded circuits. Either way, it’s good stuff.

More reasons to see it: Maggie Hoffman from Radiohole is playing Dorothy Wordsworth, the ever-enigmatic Michael Portnoy is playing Coleridge, lighting is by Eric Dyer (also of Radiohole), sound design is by Yehuda Duenyas (of The NTUSA) and there is original music by the experimental sound artists (and Bjork collaborators) Matmos.

It’s like, how much more downtown-y art goodness can you ask for?
And the answer is none. None more art goodness.