'Cambodian Rock Band'

Okay, here’s a confession: I had no idea that there was such a thing as Cambodian rock music.  When I first read that Lauren Yee’s play called Cambodian Rock Band was coming to New York’s Off-Broadway, I took the title to be a metaphor of some kind until I read Ben Brantley’s New York Times review late last month. 

For others who didn’t know this bit of world music history, Cambodian rock flourished in the 1960s to the early 1970s, between the end of the reign of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1953-70) and the take-over of the country by Pol Pot and his radical Marxist Khmer Rouge (1975-79).  Based in Phnom Penh, the country’s capital, it was essentially a combination of traditional Cambodian music and Western (mostly American) pop and rock rhythms adapted from imported recordings and broadcasts of the U.S. armed forces radio (Armed Forces Network, or AFN) aimed at troops stationed in South East Asia.  The melding of the two traditions created a unique sound. I remember the history, but I never knew about the music.

There’s even a current American group, Dengue Fever (2001-the present), that started covering Cambodian hits in English, then wrote their own versions of Cambodian rock, and finally hired a Cambodian vocalist to sing the songs in Khmer.  It’s this band’s music, which combines Cambodian rock and pop music of the 1960s and ’70s with psychedelic rock and other world music styles, plus some other songs by Cambodian rockers of the pre-Pol Pot era, that Yee uses in Cambodian Rock Band.

When Diana, my usual subscription partner for the Signature Theatre Company and I signed up this season, she decided to take only four of the plays on offer, but I took all six.  Cambodian Rock Band was one of the two I attended by myself.  (The other’s coming up in May and June: Dominique Morisseau’s Confederates.)

Cambodian Rock Band, in its New York première, started previews on 4 February 2020 and opened on 24 February.  I saw the 8 p.m. performance on Saturday, 29 February on the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, the theater’s 294-seat proscenium house; it’s currently scheduled to close on 22 March (after two extensions from 7 March, the first to 14 March).  The play is Yee’s maiden production for her Residency 5 tenure at Signature, which will include three productions of new plays over the course of five-years. 

Cambodian Rock Band, with music by Dengue Fever and directed by Chay Yew (who also directs at STC), was commissioned by the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, and débuted there on 4-25 March 2018; it was presented at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland this season (6 March-27 October 2019), followed by productions at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater (12 April-5 May 2019) and the La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego (12 November-15 December 2019). There have been other regional productions around the U.S. as well.

(Both the OSF and La Jolla productions—as well as many of the other mountings—were staged by Yew; the Chicago presentation was directed by Marti Lyons.  Several cast members at OSF, La Jolla, and STC were also in the world première production in Costa Mesa.)

Yee won both the 2018 Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play and the 2019 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award for Cambodian Rock Band.

Lauren Yee, 34, was born and raised in San Francisco.  Her great-grandparents migrated to the United States from China during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). She currently lives in New York City.  At 15, she wrote her first play as part of a competition for the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco.  She graduated from Yale University in 2007 with majors in English and theater arts and then attended the University of California, San Diego’s MFA playwriting program.

The dramatist says that the Chinese Exclusion Act is among her strongest influences.  To circumnavigate this law, her forebears migrated through Mexico across the southern border into the United States and up to San Francisco.  Her father was the inspiration for two of her plays, The Great Leap (2018; Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage II, New York City) and the autobiographical King of the Yees (2015; Goodman Theatre’s New Stages Festival, Chicago), which draw directly from her Chinese-American family background.  (Leap and Cambodian Rock Band were among the 10 plays produced most by professional American theaters in the 2019-20 season.)

In addition to the Atlantic Theater, The Great Leap’s been produced at the Denver Center Theatre, Seattle Repertory, and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.  Yee’s play The Song of Summer (2019) premiered at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island.  She was a Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell fellow, a MAP Fund grantee, a member of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group, a Time Warner Fellow at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab, the Shank playwright-in-residence at New York City’s Second Stage Theatre, a Playwrights’ Center Core Writer, and the Page One resident playwright at Playwrights Realm in New York.

Besides the Foote and Steinberg awards, Yee’s the winner of the Kesselring Prize and the Francesca Primus Prize.  She’s been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Jerome Fellowship, the PONY Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award, the Sundance Theatre Lab, and the Wasserstein Prize.  Yee’s a member of the Ma-Yi Writers’ Lab and a Playwrights’ Center Core Writer and has worked under commission from the Goodman Theatre, New York’s Lincoln Center, and Minneapolis’s Mixed Blood Theatre Company.

When the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation gave the Whiting Award for 2019 to Yee, the Selection Committee stated:

The plays of Lauren Yee send history careening into the personal.  Her dialogue feels like overheard speech; even on the page, it asserts its vibrant, specific life.  It’s an audacious step to examine the legacy of the Khmer Rouge in a play that also takes on the dynamics of father/daughter relationships and the joyful legacy of Cambodian pop music, but every element here supports and amplifies the others.  These plays feel ambitious and even monumental.  They are also raucously funny, without ever losing sight of nuanced human experience.

Her plays are published by Samuel French. Cambodian Rock Band and The Great Leap were numbers 1 and 2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys’ List, a gender parity initiative to end the “systematic underrepresentation of female and trans playwrights.”

As this biographical snippet notes, Yee’s ethnic background is Chinese, not Cambodian, and her focus up to now has been on that heritage.  The playwright said she hadn’t been especially knowledgeable about Cambodia, its music, or its tragic history when a friend took her to see Dengue Fever in 2010.  She found herself attracted to the L.A. band’s mix of Cambodian pop and American ’60s and ’70s surf rock.  She was gripped by the sound and the country from which it came.

In 2011, Yee visited Cambodia where she saw Angkor Wat, the ancient temple complex, and the sites of the Khmer Rouge genocide.  “[I]t was staggering to me how recent those events were,” said the writer.  “It planted a seed since I didn’t know that much about it.”

Yee started working on early drafts of Cambodian Rock Band in 2015 on commission from the South Coast Rep’s CrossRoads Commissioning Project, which brings playwrights to Orange County “to engage with the area’s diverse communities during exploratory residencies.” The company invited Yee to Costa Mesa for 10 days in June, and she met with members of Dengue Fever at the annual Cambodian Music Festival in nearby Long Beach. The band got involved with the play, which is how Dengue Fever songs were included in the final script. 

“Dengue Fever was my gateway to Cambodia’s wild musical past,” said Yee in a 2018 interview. 

And with this music, I learned not only about Cambodia’s incredible music scene, but also the tragic fate of so many of those musicians once Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over the country for four terrifying years.  Even then, I knew this history all added up to a play, but for years, I had no idea of how to do this.

Six months later, Yee completed the first draft of Cambodian Rock Band, which was at first about the music itself.  Then Yee integrated the music into a story about the country and its people.  The playwright took an early version to a workshop with Joe Ngo, the actor who now portrays Chum in the play and had previously been in the cast of King of the Yees in 2017 (ACT Theatre, Seattle) and 2018 (Center Stage, Baltimore).  He stunned Yee when he told her that his own parents had been survivors of the Khmer Rouge reign of terror.

Yee said that she “gravitates towards family stories,” first her own family and, in Cambodian Rock Band, a fictional Cambodian father and daughter that turned out to echo the real-life history of Ngo’s family.  (In his STC program bio, Ngo states: “As a child of Khmer Rouge survivors, I am eternally grateful to have helped develop” Cambodian Rock Band.)

Yee’s first play with live music, Cambodian Rock Band centers on a group of rock musicians who get caught up in the Khmer Rouge occupation of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and the subsequent communist take-over of the country.  The massive genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot and his Marxist-Leninist government targeted intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists—including musicians—among others.  Rock musicians were especially singled out because of their cultural ties to the West, particularly the United States.

“For me as an artist,” said Yee, “the idea that music and art can be so powerful that a regime goes after you is a really startling idea.”  She has one of her characters in Cambodian Rock Band say: “[I]n case you were not aware, music is the soul of Cambodia.”  Many of Cambodia’s rock musicians disappeared during the Khmer Rouge genocide and their exact fates have never been confirmed.

Cambodian Rock Band, which deals with the fictionalized history of the crimes and trial of a Khmer Rouge leader, is really a rock concert with a play in between the musical sets.  The play opens in a flashback to April 1975 on a rock band, the Cyclos, all dressed to the nines in mid-1970s psychedelic rock finery (costumes are by Linda Cho), in a live recording session.  The music is loud and energetic and very up-beat—Yee describes it in the script as “raucous, loud, bubblegum, dissonant psychedelic surfer rock.” 

A sort of campy narrator figure (Francis Jue)—Brantley called him “a combination of the creepy Weimar-era M.C. from ‘Cabaret’ and the antic Hitler from . . . ‘Jojo Rabbit’”—who’d been juking in the aisles and engaging some of the spectators, bounds up onto the stage of STC’s Irene Diamond—in the center of which is the bandstand—and introduces the combo and the song and tells us that we’ve been witnessing a cut “from their first, last, ONLY album, recorded in Phnom Penh, April 1975.” 

On the platform are band members Rom (Abraham Kim – from the original SCR première) on drums and percussion, Pou (Jane Lui – SCR) on keyboard, Chum (Joe Ngo – SCR) on bass guitar, Sothea (Courtney Reed) on vocals and tambourine, and Leng (Moses Villarama) on lead guitar.  The musicians are all also characters in the story. 

(Casting this play must have been hellacious!  The band members all play their instruments—and one sings—and do R ’n’ R dance moves as well as act in dialogue scenes.  No wonder Yew stuck with so many of his original cast—having found so many multi-talented Asian actors, I imagine he was loath to let them go and then look for more!) 

The play, which runs two hours and 25 minutes with one intermission at STC, jumps around in time, but its “present” is April 2008, when Neary (Reed), the 26-year-old American-born daughter of Cambodian émigré Chum (pronounced Choom), is in Phnom Penh with the International Center for Transitional Justice, an NGO, preparing to take a notorious Khmer Rouge war criminal named Duch (pronounced Doik) to trial.  

Chum has showed up in Neary’s hotel room unexpectedly; though he doesn’t say so, he’s concerned that his daughter’s group is prosecuting Duch, whom Chum characterizes as a “low man on the totem pole” of the former Marxist regime in Cambodia.  Neary’s father urges her to drop the project and come home.  Into this argument walks a half-naked Ted (Villarama), another member of the NGO team—and Neary’s boyfriend.  When Chum finds out that Ted is a Canadian-born Thai, he becomes a little leery: “Can’t trust the Thai,” he said earlier.

Neary explains that, though the world believes only seven prisoners are known to have survived the prison camp run by Duch, she’s found evidence of an eighth survivor of S-21 and she’s looking for him as a witness in Duch’s trial.  Chum tries to dissuade her from this quest and the pursuit of charges against Duch, but she persists.  What we don’t learn for a few scenes is that Chum is that eighth survivor.  How he survived and escaped becomes the engine that drives the plot of Cambodian Rock Band.

(I don’t want to do a history lesson here, but I think a little background and some identifications are useful.  Cambodia, which had been a French protectorate—read “colony”—from 1863, gained independence in 1953 as the Kingdom of Cambodia under King Norodom Sihanouk, 1922-2012.  In 1970, Sihanouk was ousted by Lon Nol, 1913-85, a Cambodian politician and general who proclaimed the Khmer Republic. 

(Khmer means ‘Cambodian’ in the native language, which is also called Khmer.  Khmer Rouge, French for ‘Red Cambodian,’ is the name Sihanouk gave to the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot, 1925-98; it became the term everyone, both inside the country and abroad, used for the CPK.  Kampuchea is the anglicization of the indigenous Khmer name for Cambodia.

(On 17 April 1975, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces took Phnom Penh and the next year established the radical Marxist-Leninist state of Democratic Kampuchea.  Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge set about removing from Kampuchea all foreign and bourgeois influences by rounding up all intellectuals, professionals, capitalists, and artists and sending them to camps in the countryside; Phnom Penh, a city of 370,000 inhabitants in 1975, was almost emptied of people. 

(By 1978, only 32,000 people lived in the city; many of the Cambodians the Khmer Rouge transported died either from execution, harsh conditions and treatment, or disease.  Between 21 and 24 percent of Cambodia’s population was lost, from 1.7 to 1.9 million people. 

(After years of hostility between the two communist countries, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—the now-united North and South Vietnam—invaded Kampuchea in 1979.  The Vietnamese forces defeated the Khmer Rouge and established the People’s Republic of Kampuchea; Pol Pot fled and was eventually arrested by his own Khmer Rouge in 1997 and tried in Phnom Penh.  He received a life sentence to be served under house arrest, but died, likely by suicide, in 1998.

(In 1993, the monarchy was restored and the country again became the Kingdom of Cambodia.  King Sihanouk retook the throne until his death; his successor is his son, Norodom Sihamoni, born in 1953.  The head of government in Cambodia is Prime Minister Hun Sen, born in 1952, in office since 1985—making him the longest-ruling head of government of Cambodia.  Cambodia is still a one-party system, though the 1993 constitution provides for multiparty elections.

(Duch, the nom de guerre of Kang Kek Iew, born 1942, is a real person, a former math teacher, as he says in the play.   He was director of the infamous S-21 prison camp at which he’s believed to have exterminated an estimated 20,000 prisoners.  S-21, also called Tuol Sleng Prison, stands for Security Prison 21; converted from a former high school, it’s now a museum of the Khmer Rouge genocide.  

(Duch was tried in Cambodia in 2009 and sentenced in 2010 and is currently in solitary confinement for life in a Cambodian prison for crimes against humanity.  He’s the only Khmer Rouge official to have been tried for this offense in the 42 years since the regime was overthrown.

(One of the seven survivors of S-21 is the real-life Chum Mey, born c.1930, a mechanic and writer.  Chum, who may or may not be the model for the character in Cambodian Rock Band, escaped execution because he turned out to be excellent at keeping mechanical things in the camp running; his wife and son were both murdered by their captors.  There’s no indication the historical Chum ever immigrated to U.S. or played in a rock band; the character in Cambodian Rock Band is 51 in 2008 and 18 in 1975—according to Yee’s text—but Chum Mey would have been about 78 and 45 in those years.

(The singer Sothea of the Cyclos is modeled on the real Cambodian rocker Ros Serey Sothea, c. 1948-c. 1977, active during the final years of the Sihanouk regime and into the Lon Nol period; some of the songs in Cambodian Rock Band were written or recorded by Sothea.  She’s one of the artists who disappeared during the Khmer Rouge regime and whose fate remains unknown.)

The play flashes back again to 1975 and another performance of the Cyclos (pronounced see-klose; a cyclo is a sort of pedicab that’s a common form of transportation in southeast Asia).  The M.C. figure, who sometimes joins in with the band, playing maracas or a cow bell, reveals—rather boisterously—that he’s Duch.

In the play, the members of the Cyclos are among the 90 percent of Cambodia’s musicians who were killed during the Khmer Rouge genocide.  In the scene that closes act one, we’re back at the bandstand in 1975.  The band has just finished taping their album and they’re very high on their accomplishment. 

As they celebrate with beers all around—American beer!—Chum reveals that he and his family had planned to flee to Paris the next morning and he urges the others to escape Cambodia—or at least leave Phnom Penh.  Chum’s bandmates all scoff at his fears—they’re not political: they’ll just back whoever wins, keep their heads down, and play it safe.  Besides, the Americans will never abandon Cambodia, not after all the bombing they put the country through.  (The U.S. bombed eastern Cambodia from March 1969 until May 1970 as part of the war in Vietnam.)

Then the radio reports that the Khmer Rouge have taken the city and everyone’s evacuating—including the Americans at the embassy.  The rockers’ chance for escape, including Chum’s, has been cut off.  We know, but they don’t, that they will face horrors, torture, and, some of them, death.  (We also learn later that Chum made his family delay fleeing to Paris so he could complete the Cyclos’ album, forfeiting their chance to escape.  Chum’s whole family was slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge as a result of his self-interest.)

Returning to 2008, Neary’s searching for the eighth survivor of S-21.  She discovers that the mystery survivor is her father, but he’s not willing to testify.  Chum challenges Neary to understand what his life was like back then and why he insists on remaining anonymous. 

Duch’s cruel methods of interrogation and torture are demonstrated in one intense scene in 1978 in which a guard questions Chum, hooded and bound to a chair.  Ironically, the interrogator turns out to be Leng (pronounced Laing), a member of the now defunct Cyclos and Chum’s best friend.  Leng and Chum try to piece together what’s become of their old bandmates.

Leng, now going by the Khmer Rouge name Comrade Kee—he’s the one who insisted when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh, “Whoever wins, that’s my side”—tries to school the naïve Chum, in prison on suspicion of being a spy, on how to avoid summary execution in S-21.  Chum is passing himself off as a peasant banana-seller, and while Leng plays at interrogating him, Duch becomes curious why Chum hasn’t confessed under questioning. 

The camp commander takes over and gets Chum to admit he’s really a former rock musician.  Duch makes him prove it by playing a guitar he has stashed conveniently (“This is a Stratocaster,” shouts a stunned Chum); Chum accompanies himself unplugged on Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which the former rocker explains to Duch, “It’s a very popular song” which his band “used to play . . . all the time.”

Duch doesn’t kill Chum as he had planned, and during the night the prisoner disappears.  In 2008, Chum comes to S-21, now a museum, and to the very room in which he was interrogated.  He finds Neary there; she’s apparently spent the night on the floor.  Chum remembers his last session with Leng in that room—and what happened there that may be the reason he can’t testify or tell his daughter about his incarceration in the prison or his escape or even identify himself as a survivors of S-21.

Cambodian Rock Band doesn’t entirely work, but it was fascinating to watch it because what Yee was trying to do is pretty innovative.  I can’t think of a play I’ve seen that’s structured like this—and I don’t know one I’ve read or heard about that is, either.  Maybe it can’t work, but the attempt was certainly worth seeing.  The experiment is fascinating, however, and ultimately enjoyable as a theater experience.  Among other things, it tells me that Lauren Yee is a writer I’d like to keep an eye on. 

The pieces of this hybrid don’t fit together quite right because the two performance forms, rock concert and stage play, don’t mesh, even though the band members are also characters in the play’s plot and one of the musicians, Chum, is the principal figure in the narrative.  Courtney Reed plays two roles, Chum Neary and Sothea, the band’s singer, which theoretically bridges the two parts of the play.  So the two elements are interwoven, but they just don’t come together performatively. 

The set, designed by Takeshi Kata (who also designed the SCR première), comprised three semi-represented locales: the bandstand in some recording studio in Phnom Penh, Neary’s Phnom Penh hotel room, and the interrogation room at S-21 represented by a single wall and a wooden chair in which Chum is bound.  Other locations, such as the “fish spa” at the Sheraton Hotel across from Neary’s hotel, are suggested.  The areas of the stage that aren’t part of a setting are dark, giving the impression that the depicted locations are floating in a void.

David Weiner’s lighting (he was with director Yew at the South Coast Rep, too) is generally shadowy; there’s even a fog effect that’s used occasionally.  It all adds up to a kind of mythical atmosphere which struck me as a little over the top.  The Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia is no more a legend than Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union—it was quite real and not all that long ago, just 40-44 years.  I was 29 to 33—and I remember it pretty well.  I wonder if the Cambodians who lived through it think of the Pol Pot period as a mist-shrouded dream or nightmare.  Or a horror that was all too real.

The music, under the supervision of Matt MacNelly and sound designer Mikhail Fiksel (both also vets of the SCR début) was certainly rousing and wild, as Yee prescribed, but it functions more as punctuation to the dialogue scenes—dashes or ellipses—rather than commentary or counterpoint since most of the lyrics are in Khmer.  (There are translations in the play text, but that’s little help to theatergoers.)

That’s one reason I felt the rock concert-cum-stage play didn’t coalesce.  Another makes me sound like a geezer.  Okay, I am a geezer, but I found the music’s volume, even though it’s what the author intended, was too loud.  Not for my ears—I’m from the original rock ’n’ roll generation, after all—but because the volume of the music overwhelmed the dialogue scenes, which for the most part are quiet and low-key (yes, even the interrogation scenes at S-21).  It was like switching channels on a TV back and forth between one with the sound all the way up and one at a moderate level.

Now, before I get to the actual acting—the actors portraying their characters—I want to say something about a tactic taken by Yee and Yew.  Ngo, who plays an immigrant to the U.S., speaks English in the 2008 scenes—with his daughter and Ted, who are native-born English-speakers (one American and one Canadian)—with a pronounced accent and slightly off-center syntax.  But in the scenes in the past, all the actors who play Cambodian characters, including Ngo, speak unaccented standard American English.  (There’s no dialect coach listed in the program, but Sokunthary Svay is credited as Khmer Language Consultant.)  This is because the characters are all speaking fluent native Khmer.  It’s a practice of which I wish more actors, directors, and playwrights would take note.

(In my report on One November Yankee, posted on Rick On Theater on 6 January, I remarked on the unidentifiable “Jewish” accents affected by actors Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers in one scene.  I complained: “Why they needed any kind of accent, you’ll have to ask [playwright Joshua] Ravetch; most of us have only the regional accent from where we grew up—mine’s a general Mid-Atlantic speech pattern.  I had a roommate in college who was Jewish and he sounded a little like Lucas Black, late of NCIS: New Orleans—because he was from Birmingham, Alabama; my parents knew a Jewish man from Melbourne, Australia, and he talked a bit like Crocodile Dundee.”  The point is that not every “ethnic” character has a corresponding “ethnic” accent.)

Cambodian Rock Band is an ensemble show—and the band is an ensemble within an ensemble.  With doubling and cross-overs, all the actors in the cast—including Francis Jue’s Duch, though he doesn’t play a band member—appear with the Cyclos.  Further, many in the cast have been with the play since the South Coast Rep première (Ngo goes back to an early workshop) or joined the cast in a subsequent staging (Villarama joined the company at OSF and appeared again at La Jolla).  The result is a pretty tightly knit cast working with a director who knows the play well. 

Even given Yee’s bifurcated structure for the play, this company of actors works together as a unit.  That makes it hard to single out performances, but Joe Ngo as Chum is certainly a principal figure because Cambodian Rock Band is largely his story—granted, as a surrogate for, first, Cambodian musicians and then all Cambodians in general under the Khmer Rouge rule. 

Some reviewers saw Ngo’s performance as over the top, especially his cartoonish, middle-aged goofball, but I think they all missed what was actually happening.  It’s a performance—not just Ngo as Chum, but Chum as the fussy dad in 2008 and the apparently oblivious, frightened prisoner in 1978; only the 18-year-old musician in 1975 is a glimpse of the real Chum without the mask.  Remember, this is a man who has spent 26 years hiding his truth from his daughter (who thinks, for instance, her father’s an only child when in fact he had seven brothers and sisters before the Khmer regime).  Using only a shift in his center of gravity and a change in his expression, Ngo transforms from one aspect of Chum to another before our eyes and there’s no question who he is in any scene.  It’s heartrending.

As the cold and emotionless Duch, Francis Jue is also giving a double performance—but we never really see the unmasked Duch.  There’s brief glimpse of him at the end of his interrogation of Chum—or is there?—but his mercurial and playful M.C. and even the chatty Khmer Rouge leader, once we know who he is, is all the more chilling for his assumed persona.  Playing a psychopathic chameleon, Jue’s the very exemplar of Hamlet’s warning that “The Devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape.”

The rest of the cast, which means the band members and the two North Americans, all did well, including the differentiating between their band roles and their other characters (that means essentially Courtney Reed as Sothea and Neary and Moses Villarama as Leng and Ted).  Villarama did especially nicely as Chum’s diffident Khmer Rouge interrogator in the 1978 scenes at S-21. 

As the Cyclos’ lead guitarist, Villarama is charismatic and focused on the band’s future but politically indifferent and wishy-washy, but as comrade Kee, he becomes a darker presence, an opportunistic survivor who’s taken up the cause of the Khmer Rouge as long as it secures his survival.  When Leng/Kee recognizes Chum, Villarama loses even that strength and can’t cope with the moral dilemma that confronts him.  The portrait the actor draws is as horrifying as Leng’s fate.

Reed’s Neary is something of a cypher, a plot device to get the story going, but as Sothea she shines as the band’s front vocalist.  The original Jasmine in Disney’s Aladdin on Broadway, her bio doesn’t include any rock appearances, but David Rooney of Hollywood Reporter aptly dubbed her Sothea “a Southeast Asian Grace Slick.”  (I suspect you may have to be my age really to get this.)

My search for on-line reviews included 18 that I selected to summarize.  (There were also quite a few notices for the previous productions of Cambodian Rock Band before the New York première.)  Starting with the dailies, Matt Windman of amNewYork called it an “overstuffed but exciting play with music” by “the least-known best-known American playwright for New York theatergoers.”  Chay Yew’s staging, wrote Windman, is “vibrant,” but he added, “The play takes on so many different tones and guises (family sitcom, ‘Law & Order,’ prison drama, history lesson, rock concert, mystery thriller) that it ends up feeling overstuffed and overlong.”  Windman reported that the playwright “delves into many areas of serious discussion including international relations, national identity, justice and the role of the artist in an authoritarian regime,” but found, “Nevertheless, many of the scenes are quite moving.”

In the New York Times, Ben Brantley, labeling Cambodian Rock Band a “brash but conventionally sentimental play,” described it as “structured, a bit haphazardly, as a nest of frames within frames.”  He felt:

It is as if Yee . . . feels that a subject as monstrous as the Khmer Rouge cannot be approached head-on.  So she tugs us, by degrees, into the horror at her play’s center with bait-and-switch tactics, which include sitcom coziness, cheerfully packaged shock effects (including dark commentary by Duch) and good old rock ’n’ roll, Cambodian-style.

The “band bears weighty significance in terms of both plot and theme,” found Brantley.  Yee, asserted the Timesman, “neatly connects all the seemingly far-flung dots of her story.  But neither her script nor Yew’s production . . . can comfortably reconcile the radical shifts in style and mood.”  He continued, however: “This is a shame.  For there is indeed a compelling heart of darkness in ‘Cambodian Rock Band.’” 

In the New Yorker’s “Goings On About Town” feature, Elisabeth Vincentelli observed, “Fact and fiction, past and present are interwoven in Lauren Yee’s play with music.”  Vincentelli found that “Yee’s storytelling is undermined by credibility-testing coincidences, but,” she felt, “Chay Yew’s production . . . comes alive when the actors turn into the Cyclos to perform.”

Helen Shaw said of Cambodian Rock Band in New York/Vulture that the “production is a layered construction: Inside, there’s a killer Khmer-language rock show . . ., with a less persuasive, coincidence-packed memory-play surrounding it.”  Shaw found that “Yee’s dialogue does occasionally throw a strong punch—moments can be quite powerful, even when the scenes’ edges and connective ligaments are ragged.” 

(Note: Shaw’s New York magazine column wasn’t a complete review of Yee’s play; entitled “Men to Watch in Cambodian Rock Band, Blues for an Alabama Sky, and The Headlands,” it was a laudatory article about Ngo’s performance along with two others in other shows.  She stinted somewhat on her assessment of the entire work.)

After intimating that Cambodian Rock Band is about “the doomed, fictional band Cyclo [actually, ‘the Cyclos’],” representing the many musicians rounded up and “disappeared” by the murderous Khmer Rouge regime, Marilyn Stasio of Variety reported that in “Yee’s supportive text . . . set in 2008,” she found the “contemporary squabbling between the thoroughly westernized Neary and her traditionalist father is cringe-worthy,” adding, however, that “the vivid flashback scenes set in the 1970s are riveting.”  Stasio continued, “In sharp contrast with the thin father-daughter conflict . . ., the prison scenes have more of a kick.”  She highly complimented the work of actors Jue and Reed (with additional praise for Reed’s singing as Sothea) and the playing of the actor-musicians of the Cyclos.

In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman characterized Yee’s play as “brash, disorienting.”  He found that Yee’s “theatrical artifices set [the second] section up well: What might otherwise have risked slipping into melodrama keeps its footing through the contrast with what has preceded it.”  The man from TONY added, however, that the play “doesn’t quite hang together as a whole:  It relies too much on contrivance and exposition, especially in the modern parts.”  Feldman concluded, though, that “there’s something both touching and rousing about the way it honors the lost beat of Cambodia’s past. It’s an act of defibrillation.”

David Rooney described Cambodian Rock Band in the Hollywood Reporter as a “genre-defiant blend of family reckoning, haunting historical investigation and psychedelic surf rock concert” and noted that the “sardonic humor” exhibited by Jue’s Duch in his first appearance is “part of what has made” Yee’s play a popular nationwide hit.  Rooney asserted that

the play is grounded in specific political and cultural trauma but explores a reality true for countless refugees that have escaped blood-stained birthplaces and settled in new homes, keeping silent about the psychological scars of the past.  That silence can create gulfs between immigrant parents and the children they seek to insulate from the horrors of their experience . . . .

Rooney argued, “The play provides thoughtful commentary on the cancerous moral compromises people make to survive violent oppression.” 

The HR reviewer felt that Yew directed “with an assured hand at maintaining focus through Yee’s time jumps and tricky tonal shifts.”  For example, Rooney pointed out, “There’s a clunky quality to the narrative device of having Neary go AWOL and then Chum coax her out of hiding by parceling out the real truth about his past in cellphone messages.”  The review-writer added that “once the mechanism is set in motion, the play navigates the shifting time frame and assembles its puzzle pieces with confidence.” 

Yew exhibited “tight control over [the pay’s] unwieldy dramaturgy and . . . sensitivity toward even the most flawed characters,” reported Rooney, continuing, “The production’s design elements are first-rate.”  He praised the cast: “The solid ensemble is a seamless mix of actors from previous productions with newcomers, all of them benefiting from the compassion, humanity and playfulness with which Yee invests even her most challenging characters.”  The reviewer’s conclusion is sweeping:

The play’s chief weakness is that the whole reason for Chum’s unannounced arrival in Cambodia is his fear that Neary will never look at him the same way once she knows his truth, and Yee makes that discovery anticlimactic.  But when the action swerves with time-tripping magic into a performance that suggests the enduring power of music—and by extension, the human spirit—to outlast even the most horrific experience, it’s easy to be swept along by the foot-stomping beat.

On TheaterMania, David Gordon said that Cambodian Rock Band “has become one of those mythical titles after only two years of existence” and dubbed it a “genre-exploding drama.”  He declared, “It’s one of those plays that everyone in the know has whispered about, and now that it’s reached its New York City premiere via Signature Theatre, we completely understand why.”  Gordon felt that “Cambodian Rock Band may not be one of the most surprising plays in terms of its twists, but it is deeply affecting, noteworthy theater.”

The TM reviewer found that while the first-act comedy “is staged a little too vigorously . . ., the real arc of Cambodian Rock Band suddenly kicks into high gear afterward, sneaking up on you while you’re not looking.”  He compared the second-act confrontations of prisoner and captor to “great Shoah films like Life Is Beautiful and Schindler’s List.”  Though Gordon thought Jue’s performance is “the equivalent of an over-the-top football touchdown dance,” the review-writer proclaimed that “the evening belongs to Ngo”: “His work is one of the many great pleasures I derived from Yew’s rousing production.”

Gordon concluded that:

the real achievement of Yee’s script is its humanity.  This is a big-hearted, life-affirming look at a terrible tragedy that ends with a high-spirited rock concert.  Cambodian Rock Band shows us how music has the power to save our souls when all hope seems lost.

Declaring that STC’s “triumphant new” production of Cambodian Rock Band “is taking Off-Broadway by storm,” New York Theatre Guide’s Austin Yang asserted that Yee’s “wittily funny, wonderfully complex, and deeply moving work ends . . . [i]n a defiant celebration of irresistible joy.”  The playwright, wrote Yang, “offers a human lens to her characters and doesn’t shy away from the complex nature of their moral conflict.”  The NYTG reviewer found that the “entire cast is nothing short of stellar” and added that Jue is “magnificent” and that “his casting as a sadistic and methodical war criminal is a stroke of twisted genius”; Reed “will transport you across time and space” and Ngo “will shred a chord to simultaneously break and mend your heart.”  Yang concluded with the affirmation “Human beings are complex, and deal with trauma in complex ways.  Perhaps Cambodian Rock Band’s greatest triumph is in asserting joy as one of them.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale proclaimed, “Family secrets, political history, moral dilemmas in the face of genocide and loud, kick-ass rock tunes mix terrifically in Lauren Yee’s gripping and (for this reviewer) informative new drama,” which he also labeled “an often horrifying, but ultimately exhilarating reminder that if there’s one thing totalitarian regimes fear, it’s artists.”  Yew “deftly handles the play’s tricky shifts from historic drama to cute comedy to dark humor to vibrant bursts of musical defiance.” 

“Cambodian Rock Band is an important play,” decreed James Wilson on Talkin’ Broadway; it’s a “cross between documentary theater and political melodrama.”  He observed that it “combines a number of different dramatic styles and theatre forms.  To Yee's credit, it mostly works.”  The Cambodian pop songs, Wilson felt, “provide a flavor for the period before the genocide,” but the “bubblegum-pop style . . .  undercuts the emotional power of the prison scenes as well as the personal and national trauma exposed throughout the play.” 

In Yew’s staging, the TB reviewer felt, “the production moves swiftly, and, for the most part, the actors effectively and seamlessly transform into different characters or younger versions of themselves.”  He found Ngo “moving in his scenes as a loving father, but both as a nerdy, young musician and as an exceedingly fussy middle-aged man, he applies broad strokes and cartoonish qualities.  The play would benefit from a more subtle approach across the board.”  Wilson, though, found using Duch as narrator and M.C. “problematical” because Jue “is neither creepy nor sinister enough to create an underlying sense of foreboding.”  “In the end,” the review-writer concluded, “the play, overstuffed with ideas and theatricality, does not pack the emotional wallop one might expect.”

Jonathan Mandell of New York Theater declared:

A rock concert may seem an odd, even inappropriate, way for a play about genocide to begin, but what comes next is even more jarring in this disorienting, genre-bending show that shifts tone and time and focus—and may arguably be the best way, perhaps the only way, Yee could have told the story she wanted to tell.

“The plot of Cambodian Rock Band hinges on a couple of coincidences . . .  that probably should have given me pause, but they didn’t bother me,” warned Mandell.  “I bought into these twists, or at least accepted their importance to the play’s cohesiveness.”  In conclusion, the NY Theater/DC Theatre Scene reviewer contrasts Yee’s approach to the “harrowing” history “with Hunters, the current TV series on Amazon Prime in which Al Pacino leads a band of Nazi hunters, which is so cartoon-like in its over-the-top depiction of Nazi horrors that I found it unwatchable after a couple of episodes—not because of the horror, but because of its lack of authenticity.”

Calling the play “brilliant,” JK Clarke posits on Theater Pizzazz that

most westerners’ knowledge of the Pol Pot’s destructive and bloody reign in Cambodia comes from Roland Joffés’s masterful 1984 film, The Killing Fields.  But now, in the form of Lauren Yee’s brilliant new play with music, Cambodian Rock Band . . ., there’s another view of this tumultuous era—one that will simultaneously warm and shatter your heart. 

Clarke reported that “the overall drama and insight into an often sickening examination of human relationships” of Cambodian Rock Band has “twists which some might see coming, but others aren’t so obvious.”  He observed that “under Chay Yew’s terrific direction Lauren Yee’s beautifully written play is . . . multi-layered and complex.” 

“Cambodian Rock Band features delightful acting, particularly from Jue, [Reed] and Ngo,” the TP reviewer felt, “but with all the actors doubling as musically talented members of The Cyclos it’s particularly impressive.”  Clarke concluded, “Cambodian Rock Band is one of the best productions of the season. Powerful, provocative and yet delightfully entertaining.”

As it often does, New York Stage Review posted two notices on Cambodian Rock Band.  In the first one, Melissa Rose Bernardo labeled the play “gripping, wildly original” and assured prospective theatergoers that it isn’t “a didactic history lesson.”  Bernardo proclaimed, “Playwright Lauren Yee is smart”; then she explained why she thinks so.

First she piques our curiosity with a quintet of actors in a riot of polyester, paisley prints, bell-bottoms, and jangly gold jewelry playing psychedelic Cambodian rock . . . .  Then she hands the narrative reins to the immensely appealing [Francis] Jue, an actor whose presence enlivens and enriches any production . . . .  And it turns out—wait for it!—that he’s playing the villain . . . .

“I am telling my friends to grab seats for Cambodian Rock Band,” announced Michael Sommers in the second NYSR review, “so let me tell you the same.”  He described the play as “an increasingly scary drama” and “a seriously entertaining show” which is “[v]ery sharply written by Lauren Yee and brilliantly performed by an exceptional ensemble of six actor/musicians.”  Sommers portrayed Yew as “a smart director who makes the dramatic utmost of offbeat works and certainly does so here.” 

The NYSR reviewer characterized the play as “a compelling depiction of a modern society transformed practically overnight into a brutal state” and found, “It is vividly rendered in strategic plotting and visceral language by the playwright.”  He praises the cast, singling out Jue, “whose cool, cunning portrait of Duch as a killer bureaucrat is something eerie,” and Ngo’s Chum, who “believably assumes or sheds some 30 years as his character switches between a dorky old dad and an oblivious rock ‘n’ roller.”  Labeling the production “edge-of-your-seat theater” and “intensifying dramas that sneaks up and grabs you by the throat,” Sommers predicted that “Cambodian Rock Band is a major event of the off-Broadway season.”

On Theatre’s Leiter Side, Samuel L. Leiter posed an unlikely scenario:

Imagine, if you will, a Holocaust drama about a Jewish klezmer band, in which one of the musicians, failing to flee the oncoming Nazis in time, ends up in a concentration camp, where he’s tortured under the supervision of an Eichmann-like authority.  Then imagine that this dire situation is surrounded by a heavy infusion of rambunctious, even joyous klezmer music, ending with a festive, musical explosion in which the audience is up on its feet, dancing at its seats, arms waving, as if watching a concert at the Beacon.  [Klezmer music is a type of popular Central- and East-European Jewish folk music.]

“Yes,” quipped Leiter.  “A show combining genocidal horror with head-banging joy.”

“Not an easy combination to imagine,” the blogger continued, “but that’s what—give or take a few drawbacks—playwright Lauren Yee and director Chay Yew have just about pulled off in Cambodian Rock Band.”  One of the “drawbacks” Leiter identified is that act one “is so concerned with exposition . . . that it’s easy to wonder where its dramatic heart is.”  In act two, however, the blogger-reviewer noted, Jue’s Duch “takes on a far darker tone,” as does the play. 

“Yee’s language is always vibrantly alive, and, while her plotting is sometimes awkward and contrived (the story depends on a huge coincidence), she nevertheless manages to compel attention,” found Leiter, and Yew’s “lively direction swings back and forth between bold theatricality and basic realism, although the former generally gets the edge.”  The blogger felt, “Cambodian Rock Band is hard to categorize, however, since its music—like what you’d hear in certain jukebox musicals—is unconnected to its story; many lyrics are actually in Cambodian.  Even with 13 numbers, it’s hard to call it a musical.  Whatever you call it, you won’t soon forget it.”

In the end, Leiter said, “I admit to having felt a bit uncomfortable at joining in the celebratory finale . . . but I also felt I’d been present at a work of raw theatrical power.  Unquestionably, Cambodian Rock Band rocks.”

Eugene Paul of TheaterScene.com imagined that playwright Yee was so stunned by “her daring” that she “trembled.”  I don’t know where he got this idea, but okay—I’ll take it as a metaphor (and, perhaps, a projection). 

“As the weight of anguished Cambodian history suffuses Lauren Yee’s play,” wrote Paul, “the inspired creation of the rock band leavens the story and every character in the band  becomes Cambodia past and Cambodia present.”  He reported, “In Takeshi Kata’s brooding setting, director Chay Yew passionately sets a tone.”  The review-writer posited, “Yee has found her way of grabbing us.  We are her partners.” 

On TheaterScene.net (not to be confused with TheaterScene.com, summarized above), Victor Gluck characterized Yee’s play as “an engrossing, entertaining and appalling investigation,” though “Chay Yew’s production is one that does not require prior knowledge to get caught up in the fictional play and the ugly, true history of Cambodia.”  Gluck found that “the shifts in tone and style . . . are problematic” to the play, even though elements, like casting Duch as the M.C., cover the problem somewhat.  Still, the reviewer affirmed that “the play and its story are fascinating as well as horrifying.”

[In her review of Cambodian Rock Band, summarized above, Variety’s Marilyn Stasio wrote of the scene in which Duch makes Chum prove he was a rock musician before the Khmer Rouge took power by singing Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that the song “actually makes little sense here.”  Some other reviewers made similar remarks, while most, I think, took the choice as merely a nostalgic return to a song that was popular with the Cyclos’ audiences and which, therefore, Chum and his bandmates often played at gigs. 

[I think Dylan’s 1960s counterculture anthem (it was released in the U.S. in 1964) can be heard as a memorial to a moment in Cambodia’s history when everything changed, especially for artists like Chum and his friends.  But, as I wrote to my friend Kirk Woodward after he saw a recent Dylan concert at the Beacon (see Kirk’s report, “Bob Dylan Dance Party,” posted on 17 December 2019), the song has a specific connection for me.  I told the story, which dates back to 1965 or so, of that connection as an afterword to Kirk’s article.]

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DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC, CAMBODIAN ROCK BAND ENDED ITS RUN AT THE SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY ON 11 MARCH 2020