Young Jean Lee is standing in the hallway of the Brooklyn Arts Exchange, taking a quick break from rehearsals for a new project. Children run and scream past her, on their way to dance class. I need answers from her — about what these plays of hers mean — but she only has a few minutes to talk.

Lee is not your high school English teacher’s playwright.

Her 2006 play on Asian American identity politics, “Songs of Dragons Flying to Heaven,” was impishly subtitled “A Show About White People in Love.” It began with a disturbing video of Lee being slapped in the face, continued through a chorus of women in hanboks performing morbidly bawdy gags and concluded with a self-involved white couple alternately squabbling and reading love poems to one another, though actually, it was kind of difficult to tell what the conclusion was.

Lee’s shows — experimental and occasionally abrasive romps of absurdity — often leave audience members shifting uncomfortably in their seats, struggling to comprehend what they just saw. And this has made her, at 33, one of the hottest playwright/directors in New York’s avant-garde, off-Broadway theater world.

“I aspire to make my plays so challenging and complicated that you don’t end up with a clear answer, and it just leaves you with that feeling of being emotionally affected by something,” she says, “but not knowing what.”

Lee casually tells me that in the last five years she’s achieved things that might take other artists 15. After dropping out of Berkeley’s literature Ph.D. program, she arrived in New York in 2002 and has since written and directed five original plays. The New York Times has hailed them as “refreshing” and “directed brilliantly.” This year, she took home an OBIE Award — off-Broadway’s answer to the Tonys — for best emerging playwright.

It’s not surprising that, as a child, she wrote bizarre stories. Her English teachers raved about her work, but she thought it was too far out to seriously consider writing as a career path.

Her 2004 show “The Appeal,” a gleefully inaccurate peek at English Romantic poets that features Wordsworth and Coleridge acting like spoiled teens on Laguna Beach. Yet, behind the audience’s laughter is an artist trying, in spite of herself, to prod those who are watching to re-think their assumptions about what makes artists so special.

“Young Jean has the sharpest knife in the business,” says Vallejo Gantner, artistic director of Public Space 122, the Lower East Side arts center where several of Lee’s shows have premiered. “It cuts right through the bone.”

Lee grew up in Pullman — a rural college town in eastern Washington — and says she was as miserable as any middle-class kid with loving parents can be. She remembers Pullman as a snobby, boring area and was repulsed by its complacency and narrow-mindedness.

She was hardly more comfortable around her family. Her parents, who emigrated from Korea when she was 2, were devout evangelical Christians She found their beliefs “totally insane.”