East West Players
There’s something truly magical and quite enchanted about Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, now opening the 60th season of East West Players, our nation’s oldest and most prolific Asian-American theatre company based right here in downtown Los Angeles.
The play with music features a remarkably tight onstage band playing the joyfully psychedelically-tinged 60s and 70s-era sounds of the LA-based Dengue Fever, musicians who a quarter-century ago first brought to the local music scene the pre-Khmer Rouge Cambodian soul of artists such as Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea, Pen Ran and others, most of whom died or disappeared during the country’s takeover by the bloody regime that all but destroyed their vulnerable country.
The play begins as an infectious confection celebrating their spirited Western-influenced fusion recalling a true Golden Age in the history of contemporary music, but this lighthearted rocking deliverance soon turns to something quite ominous as it segues into the story of the decimation of the then quickly evolving Cambodian lifestyle when the brutal Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) swept through the country, took over the capital city of Phnom Penh, and ruled with Trumpian authoritarian intolerance from 1975 to 1979.
What begins as a piece of theatre that makes you want to shake your air tambourines quickly devolves into a cautioning of the dangers of letting virulent and self-serving monsters take over the reins. With the invaluable help of Jason H. Thompson's dynamic video projections, set designer Mina Kinukawa’s bandstand also transforms into the bleakness of S-21, the real former high school taken over by the Khmer Rouge to become a place where the regime tortured and took over 2,100 lives during its attack on the modern lifestyle of the country at that time—a genocide that before its demise four years later was responsible for the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians, around 25% of the country’s total population.
I suspect a lot of what has made Cambodian Rock Band such a critically-acclaimed production since its premiere in 2018 here at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa has been what former Angeleno theatremaker extraordinaire Chay Yew, now recognized as one of our country's most noteworthy directors, brought to the production since its development at SCR. Rock Band has toured extensively across the country since its local debut, including stops at Berkeley Rep, Washington DC‘s Arena Stage, and in New York at the prestigious Signature Theatre.
Traveling back-and-forth through time with whiplash speed, the play tells the story of a NGO prosecutor named Neary (Kelsey Angel Baehrens), an American of Cambodian descent who has been in the country almost two years in an effort to help put Duch, a notorious master of genocide during the insurrection, behind bars where he belongs. There are seven known survivors of the death camp he controlled, we’re told, but Neary’s organization believes there’s an eighth she’s trying to find with only an old faded photograph to go by—a discovery that, with his testimony, could cinch her case.
As Neary and her coworker/paramour Ted (Tim Liu) pull themselves out of bed in her hotel room, she receives a surprise visit from her father Chum (Joe Ngo), who has arrived unexpectedly from the United States and is returning to his home country for the first time in 30 years since fleeing the political conflict. What happened back then is something he has chosen never to talk about at home, especially with the once-pampered princess of a daughter he dreamed of raising early in his life.
Most of Neary’s knowledge of the subject and interest in the admonitory events that unfolded back then came from discussing it behind her dad's back with her mother, who had no idea herself that Chum was about to max out a credit card and take off to Phnom Penh—not really to see the sights and find familiar places from his youth to look back upon, but more importantly to talk his daughter into coming home, resuming her law studies, and give up this ghost of taking down Duch and dredging up the memories of a time he would rather forget.
There’s a major twist in the story, which in other less gifted hands than the almost palpable close artistic collaboration between the playwright and her inspired director would seem hard to swallow, but the imagination Yew brings to this production makes it possible to buy Yee’s rather farfetched and artistically convenient bump in the storyline, something that 's actually revealed early on in the first act but here will remain undisclosed because it must be experienced firsthand to buy its premise.
All of the musicians in the exceptional onstage band double as the play's various characters, stepping out from behind their instruments and microphones to become the characters in the tale. The Joplin-voiced Baehrens is spectacular in both regards, both as the band’s featured vocalist (based on the real Ros Serey Sothea, one of those artists who went poof during the conflict) and as the daughter finding herself in a crushing situation she did not expect to endure. The performers are all extremely charismatic, but particularly Baehrens, one of the two new actors who have joined the company since its initial run at SRC.
Ngo is exceptionally effective as the father whose most entertaining Ugly American tourist vibe is dashed against the rocks as in flashback he becomes himself as a young man personally caught in the worst kind of nightmare during the takeover. Daisuke Tsuji acts as a glib and energetic narrator almost in the vein of the Emcee from Cabaret, but the character is soon revealed as Duch himself, commandant of the nightmarish S-21 where so many innocent Cambodian citizens were horribly tortured and murdered. His name is fictional, but the character is based on the real-life Kang Kek Iew, a mild math teacher who creepily transformed into someone known as the country’s resident Himmler and is today still serving a life sentence as the conflict’s most fecund mass murderer.
The other actors/musicians are also uniformly committed both to their music and their roles in the drama, with a special shout out to Jane Lui, who smokes on keyboards bigtime. The design elements are impressive, especially Kinukawa’s simple and austere set, a perfect backdrop for Thompson's vivid projections, as well as Derek Jones’ lighting, Linda Cho’s costuming, and particularly Megumi Katayama and Mikhail Fiksel’s crescendoing sound plot which reverberates through the walls of EWP’s longtime home in a converted J-town church.
Still the true wonder of this production is Lauren Yee‘s rule-defying script which somehow manages to almost jarringly shift from the excitement of pre-compromised Cambodia to the ugly coup d-etat that marked an end to the kind of progressive joy and permissiveness that the country had come to embrace. If this all sounds eerily familiar after what our own country is in danger of experiencing in its current quickly evolving political situation, it certainly is.
As my old friend and now committed New Yorker Chay Yew mentioned in a conversation with me during the usual EWP pre-show reception, every venue his Cambodian Rock Band has played along the way since its inception in Costa Mesa seven years ago has proven to be timely visit and, as our country is beginning to feel as though we're in the midst of the same kind of brazen oligarchial coup, nothing could be more apropos or unsettling than the timing of its current long overdue debut to Los Angeles audiences.
Perhaps the most chilling line from Lauren Yee’s remarkable achievement comes directed at the math teacher who became a tyrant of unspeakable proportion: “It's been 30 years,” he’s reminded by his broken and still haunted former eighth surviving prisoner, “and you’re still saying you were just following orders.” For all decent and rightfully concerned Americans right now, let that be a warning none of us should take lightly.