I’m about to tell you not to miss a play about genocide ... and that's not even the weird part... I’m going to tell you it’s a fun night out. Before you think I’ve completely lost my mind, let me break down Lauren Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band at East West Players.
The play is set in Phnom Penh and bounces back and forth between 2008 and 1975. It’s the story of how a Cambodian father (who survived the genocide of the Khmer Rouge) and his American immigrant daughter make sense of those atrocities and how they fit into their own lives. But it’s also the story of Cambodian rock music of the 1960s and '70s.
How those two fit together and bounce across time is part of the magic of the play which starts out feeling a bit like a mess. You jump from an amazing performance by a live five-piece rock band into an odd narrator who leaps up from the audience to take control — only to drop us in a hotel room and a seemingly unrelated story of an over-eager Asian dad barging in unannounced on his daughter. While you might not know what’s going on, playwright Lauren Yee definitely does. Part of the joy of the play is how all the disparate threads get woven together.
The engine of the play is the mystery of the past. Like a good detective story, we keep accumulating pieces and trying to make sense of the whole. At its core, we’re following the redemptive story of a father and daughter, but along the way, Ms. Yee plays with who owns a narrative and the power of music to connect across place and time. It’s a play where small, bizarre details all suddenly make sense in the end.
Alongside Ms. Yee’s dialogue is the music of LA’s own Dengue Fever. The play bounces back and forth between the music and the story until they finally merge. If you’ve never heard Dengue Fever’s music, it draws inspiration from this same time and place. The band came together back in 2001 to play Cambodian rock music created by artists who were then either killed or disappeared by the Khmer Rouge — a continuation of a lost moment.
While each component of the play is stellar, what’s striking is the journey the playwright crafts to bring it all together. She makes the evening a joyous triumph rather than a somber remembrance — without short-changing the tragedy. I won’t give away too much because it’s a play where the discovery is critical to the journey.
East West just extended the production so don’t miss this one.
Cambodian Rock Band plays through March 27th at East West Players in downtown LA.