'The Shipment': A banquet of food for thought about racial imagery

On the Boards is opening its new season with a crude, confounding, provocative and at times ripely offensive performance piece.

That's a good thing. Because the subject of the Young Jean Lee's Theatre acclaimed Off Broadway show "The Shipment" is the racially charged cultural imagery of African Americans, and its impact.

And the jagged, caustic beauty of this piece is that Korean-American writer-director Lee and five splendid black actors offer no instant catharsis or prescription for what ails us, but a new angle on it.

They just lob a trio of loaded vignettes at you, little cluster bombs that keep on detonating.

After a prancing dance prelude, with nods to minstrel antics and hip-hop moves, actor Douglas Scott Streater delivers a profane stand-up routine, designed for equal-opportunity discomfort.

The trash-talking monologue pushes the confrontational style of such black comics as Richard Pryor and Chris Rock to the max. It builds from graphic, misogynist sex jokes to toilet humor to smackdown attacks on white people (for "whining," stupidity, intolerance) with a few salvos at blacks, too.

The next scene adopts the deadpan tone of a children's primer or old-school cartoon. In a saga that looks ridiculous when stripped of all glamour and jive, a black child, Omar (Aundré Chin), embodies a chain of ghetto stereotypes: he wants to be a rapper, gets busted for dealing drugs and becomes a blinged-out gangsta star.

The finale of "The Shipment" is in yet another key. It's an Albee-esque cocktail party that spasmodically reveals the quirks, aggressions and self-loathing of the host (Streater) and guests.

Lee ends it with a killer punchline wide-open to interpretation — a welcome departure from all the huffing and puffing debates about race and Obama on TV.

Like a communal Rorschach test, "The Shipment" may fuel more honest post-show discourse. Like: What did you laugh at, while other patrons cringed? And vice versa? And why?

If the show sounds grueling, it is not. Lee deftly employs aspects of black popular entertainment — from minstrelsy to "Kings of Africa"-style comedy, etc. — to poke at larger questions.

Lee also keeps things unpredictable. And she relies on her terrific cast (which also includes Prentice Onayemi, Amelia Workman and the great scamp Mikéah Ernest Jennings) to keep you laughing, arguing and (above all) questioning your own assumptions.