Some Off-Broadway Plays from the Archive

 

FAR AND WIDE
by Arthur Schnitzler
adapted by Jonathan Bank
Mint Theater Company
13 February 2003 

I saw an adaptation of Das Weite Land, a 1911 play by Austrian dramatist Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), Tuesday night, 11 February [2003].  The Mint Theater calls this version Far and Wide, but in 1979, British playwright Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) did a version he called Undiscovered Country.  I never saw the Stoppard (it was done at Hartford Stage, but was never staged in New York City), but I have to believe it was at least more amusing in its use of language than Jonathan Banks’s rendition. 

The Mint’s adaptation, which cuts the play from four hours (it was recently performed in its original version in Salzburg, Austria) to 2½ and from 29+ characters to 11, is talky and entirely undramatic.  (I have some real problems with the set and costume designs—they make no sense in any context I can figure out—but these are inconsequential considering the problems with the text.) 

Even with the missing 18+ characters, there are several that serve no dramatic purpose, and barely a plot function.  Two, in fact—left over from the one scene in which most of the extra characters appear—have no purpose at all.  (They’re clearly meant to be comic, and may have been part of the “local color” of the scene, a sort Grand Hotel setting, but they’re not funny here and add nothing useful to the play.) 

Other extraneous characters are required for the plot—though they’re not important—and mostly clutter the production.  I had trouble keeping some of them straight—there are lots of domestic relationships in this play: spouses, ex-spouses, children, lovers, ex-lovers, friends, and so on. 

Worst of all, the play’s point—or the point director/adapter Bank thinks it makes—is entirely obscure to me.  Hell, the dramatic focus doesn’t even show up until the end of the fourth act, and then takes place off stage in the fifth.  (Yes, that’s right: it’s a five-act play.)

Bank includes a note in the program about his “adaptation” and at the end, he says he hopes that his shortening and trimming of the play will cause other theaters to be interested in producing it.  I can’t see any reason for this hope.  [Indeed, after 17 years, no one in New York’s picked it up.]  Short or long, Far and Wide’s an enervating experience and I can’t imagine any other director wanting to stage the play. 

(Actually, I had a thought Diana, my usual theater partner, thought might work: turn the play into a PBS-type TV miniseries.  It’s a five-act play—the first “part,” three of the acts, is 90 minutes!—and if you “open” it up and put in all the atmosphere of 1911 Vienna—two of the characters, for instance, are military officers; I can just picture the uniforms!—and add some kind of climax for each act, it could make a five-part series, each act being a one-hour segment. 

(The third act—the Grand Hotel scene—takes place at a mountain hotel in the Tyrol where the guests go cliff-climbing up a mountain where a friend of the main character had fallen to his death some years earlier; the last act centers on a duel in which the main character fatally shoots a young officer who had been his wife’s lover.  Both these incidents take place off stage in the play, but on TV, I can see them played out, cutting back to the people waiting for the outcome.) 

By the way, that young officer is designated an ensign in the marines.  (The other was a lieutenant of some kind, probably in the army—so two different pre-WWI, that is, elaborate and colorful, uniforms.)  Now, both Austria and Hungary are land-locked countries; they have no coast, and, as far as I know, never had a navy.  (Although, one ruler of post-WWI Hungary was an Admiral Horty!  My dad always thought that was silly—what was he an admiral of?)  I’m sure Schnitzler wasn’t in error over this detail, but it’s curious: What service was he in?  Where did they sail?

(Irrelevant side note: In the musical The Sound of Music—and in the real-life story on which its based—the paterfamilias of the singing von Trapp family is a retired Austrian naval captain.  Now, Austria does have part of Lake Constance—the Bodensee in German—but I don’t think there are any naval installations on its shores.  Where did he serve?)

I’ve never seen a Mint Theatre show before, but I’ve seen its name around and I believe it has a good reputation  I’m not sure it’s entirely deserved, and I’ve always had the impression that it’s a kind of vanity operation.  [I’ve gone on to see several more productions at the Mint, and I came to the opinion that I wasn’t going to be a fan.  Diana is, to a degree—she likes old-fashioned plays, the Mint’s stock-in-trade—so I’ve accompanied her a few more times in recent seasons.  I have not changed my opinion.]

The Mint’s been around since around ’92, apparently—I’ve seen reviews and I’m on the mailing list somehow so I get their flyers.  Bank took over in ’94, and like I said, it seems to be his operation now.  He not only adapted this script (he’s done that before, too) and directed the production, but he’s also the artistic director of the company. 

The list of past productions is dominated by those he has directed himself (though there are occasionally other directors), and since there’s no literary manager mentioned in the program’s staff list, I assume he selects the plays Mint produces on his own.  I have no proof of this; it’s just a feeling I’ve had with the reports of this company’s work.  (The company’s turf is revivals of old plays they feel have been neglected or forgotten.  The company recently published a book of some of the plays it staged in recent years.  Bank is the book’s editor.)

Diana and I chose to go to a preview because we were just curious about this unfamiliar old play but didn’t want to pay full fare.  The production opens on 17 February and I’m curious to see what the reviews will be—if it gets reviewed.  (Mint does get reviews, but if it’s a non-commercial production, papers don’t always publish if they don’t think a show’s worth writing up.  I can certainly conceive of the Times, say, deciding this isn’t worth covering; I don’t know about other papers.)

_____

Addenda (written after the report above): There wasn’t a review in the Times on Tuesday, 18 February, but that doesn’t surprise me.  As a matter of fact, I’m surprised that the New York Post covered it.  The two tabs don’t usually devote as much space to theater as the Times (which really only started making a point of covering Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway ten years ago or so) and I wouldn’t have thought they’d have bothered. 

As for the Post’s take on Far and Wide on Tuesday, reviewer Donald Lyons must have seen a different production.  Maybe the Mint did some heavy fixing in the time since I saw the preview—though I can’t guess what they could have done.

“Imagine Chekhov as an Austrian,” suggests Lyons.  “Such is the work of Arthur Schnitzler . . . .”  All I can tell you is that that this doesn’t line up with what I saw.  The Mint’s Far and Wide sure didn’t seem Chekhovian to me—and I just saw a Chekhov (Uncle Vanya from London’s Donmar Warehouse at BAM in January).

The Daily News’s review (say that five times fast—sounds like a Danny Kaye routine!) on 19 February is a little closer to my version of the truth—though Robert Dominguez seems kinder to the play than I would have been.  “Soap opera” is a milder put-down than I think the script deserves.  He also captures Hans Tester’s performance as the husband, but gives him an out at the end.  The man never stopped waving his arms about.  (Maybe he was sending semaphore and that’s what the New York Post critic got that I didn’t see.)

I’m just surprised that both tabs have covered this show within days of its snowy opening night, and the Times hasn’t said a word.  Today’s Times even has one of its occasional omnibus theater review columns.  I wonder if Newsday is reviewing it, too.  In any case, they all seem to be being very kind to Schnitzler and the Mint, though I can’t see why. 

Clive Barnes used to be queer for anything British—he still might be, for all I know—but I don’t know why any critic would have a special bias for either Schnitzler or the Mint Theater, if that’s what’s going on here.  (Neither review really said very much about either the play or the performance; they were both very general and unspecific—and short.)

By the way, the headline for the News review—”Round & ‘Ronde’ They Go”—is awful!  (It’s a punny ref to Schnitzler’s best-known play, La Ronde.)  The paper ought to fire that headline writer.  Yeccch.

Looks like I guessed wrong about the Times’ reviewing Far and Wide.  I thought they’d let so much time go by because they weren’t going to bother running a review, but they had a small one by Wilborn Hampton in today’s paper (4 March).  It was cool, but not entirely negative.  It was actually somewhat complimentary about the play itself.  Odd that three dailies seemed to see so much more value in that script than I can.  (Not one reviewer mentioned how long the damn thing was for so little reward.  I think that’s material.)

*  *  *  *

TRYING
by Joanna McClelland Glass
Victory Gardens Theater (Chicago)
Promenade Theatre (New York)
1 November 2004 

On 29 October [2004], I saw the Off-Broadway production of Trying by Joanna McClelland Glass (b. 1936) with Fritz Weaver [1926-2016] at the Promenade Theatre on the Upper West Side.  It got a very cool review in the Times on 14 October—the writer (Charles Isherwood) praised Weaver’s performance but didn’t think much of the play or the actress opposite Weaver, Kati Brazda.  (It’s a two-character play.)  The review was exactly right, in my opinion. 

Dubbing Trying “a slight and sentimental new play . . . that is given a measure of ballast by Fritz Weaver’s gracious, subtly turned performance,” Isherwood characterized it as “both touching and comic.”  Weaver “gives a wonderfully conscientious performance,” affirmed the reviewer.  Brazda, he lamented, “recites her lines with admirable articulation but brings little emotional depth or variety to her portrayal.”

Except for the Times review, there doesn’t seem to have been much press on the play in New York.  It’s an autobiographical melodrama about the author’s stint as the secretary to Francis Biddle (1886-1968), a retired judge (the Nuremberg tribunal) and Attorney General (under Franklin Roosevelt) just before his death at 82 in 1968. 

It’s sort of Magnificent Yankee-lite—Biddle’s a stuck-in-his-ways curmudgeon, the secretary is a plucky, determined Canadian mid-westerner.  Except that he dies in the end (actually between the last two scenes), nothing happens.  It’s about the least dramatic play I’ve seen in many years.  

I have always insisted that I want theater to do more than just tell a story and this doesn’t come near making the cut.  Weaver’s performance is good, even excellent—he’s almost 79 (next January—I just looked it up); the character’s about to be 82, as he often reminds us—but he has nothing to play off of: the secretary (Brazda) is nothing more than a cue-provider.  (At one point, she brings in a Dictaphone.  It provides as much for Weaver to play against as the living actress did.) 

I don’t think this is entirely Brazda’s fault—the part isn’t written with anything to give—but she was hardly a stage presence at all.  Since we pretty much know Biddle’s going to die—he even tells us several times that that’s what he’s waiting for, just in case we don’t see it coming—the ending isn’t even remotely dramatic.  (That’s beside the fact that he dies off stage between scenes.  The final scene is the definition of anti-climax.) 

The script’s nothing more than a compilation of scenes of nostalgic reminiscence—like looking through old snapshots of someone else’s youth.  For 2½ hours, by the way.

The play was originally produced by Victory Gardens Theatre in Chicago, and Glass, who’s apparently also Canadian-born (she became a U.S. citizen in 1962)—she didn’t change that factoid for the play—has had a few other plays produced, though none whose title I recognized from anywhere.  (Brazda also has some credits, but again, I didn’t recognize any of them.  She apparently originated the role in Chicago, as did Weaver)  

For my money, there doesn’t seem to have been any reason to write this play or, then, to have produced it—much less to have moved it to New York City.  [Trying ran 11 weeks in New York, plus 2 weeks of previews.] 

One odd note: for a very small play—two actors; one set; no special effects, live music, elaborate costumes or props; and so on—the roster of producers is immense.  Then there are a half dozen listed “associate producers”—whatever they are. 

All those people piled onto this mediocre effort, but August Wilson was having trouble keeping his investors for Gem of the Ocean, the ninth in his decology of plays about the black experience in 20th-century America—and he may be our preeminent living playwright for serious drama.  Somethin’ ain’t right here.

There was one interesting thing at the performance.  As you might guess from the fact that Biddle was a Roosevelt Attorney General, he was a Democrat.  But, true to his patrician family roots (the Biddles are an old, old Pennsylvania family who in colonial days owned large chunks of what is now New Jersey), he had been a Republican until the coal miners’ strike of the 1930’s.

Every time Weaver’s Biddle said something about the switch and the reasons for it, most of the audience applauded uproariously.  It happened two or three times in the middle of the play.  The only plausible reason for this response that I could see, given that the play itself isn’t all that inspiring, was the current George W. Bush-John Kerry presidential campaign. 

New York City is a Democratic town—and the Upper West Side (where the Promenade Theatre is) is a liberal stronghold within a blue city.  [The day after I wrote this report, 75% of us in the city voted for Kerry; slightly fewer in the state.]

*  *  *  * 

LANDSCAPE OF THE BODY
by John Guare
Signature Theatre Company (New York City)
Peter Norton Space
9 May 2006 

I saw the revival of John Guare’s 1977 Landscape of the Body at the Signature Theatre Company here back last month, and I never got around to writing up my response.  Landscape  was, to put it simplistically, a disappointment.  Ben Brantley gave it a rave (a “terrific revival . . . directed with equal measures of sensationalism and sensitivity”) in the Times a day before I saw it on 18 April [2006], especially singling out the two female leads. 

I went into the show expecting to like it, even wanting to, if you know what I mean.  I’ve had serious problems with Brantley’s criticism since he became the Times’ main theater reviewer, and I have mostly come to discount his judgment and just read him for description and whatever objective information he provides.  [Brantley, who retired from the Times’ theater desk in October 2020, started reviewing for the Gray Lady in 1993.]

We’ve differed so often, in both directions, that I’ve concluded he and I don’t see the same shows.  (I may have once explained that I think Brantley, who doesn’t associate with anyone in the New York theater scene, experiences things, including plays, in his own imagination, not in the same reality in which the rest of us experience things.  [See “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward,” Part 2, posted on Rick On Theater on 8 November 2009.]) 

Nevertheless, because Landscape isn’t a new play but a “known quantity,” if you will, and because I generally like Guare, I was prepared to like the play despite the dichotomy of my responses with Brantley’s.  Even a stopped clock, as a friend used to like to say, is right twice a day.  I shoulda gone with my instincts.

I wanted to like Landscape so much, it took several scenes before I realized that it’s a confused, and possibly self-indulgent, mess.  I tried at first to see if the production was to blame, but it wasn’t.  Brantley had praised the stagework heavily, comparing it favorably to the previous Signature show, the wonderful revival of Horton Foote’s Trip to Bountiful [see my report on ROT on 25 May 2013]. 

He asserted that that was the definitive revival of the Foote play—an opinion I actually won’t argue with (except to caution that “definitive” in live theater is a dubious claim, no matter how good something is)—and that this staging of Landscape will do for Guare’s 1977 play what the earlier one did for Foote’s 1957 masterpiece.  Uh-uh—no way. 

It’s not that the acting or directing is lacking, but that the play just isn’t for Guare what Bountiful is for Foote [1916-2009].  The Foote’s a wonderful evocation of a world which the playwright created and populated, then revisited—with us along for the rides—on many subsequent occasions.  His characters are lovingly created human beings with personalities, foibles, quirks, failings, and strengths.  They ebb and flow, just like those in real people (except to more dramatic consequence, of course). 

The plays seem slight—because the slice of the Foote world he lets us see each time is small, but not inconsequential—but they’re not.  None of this is in evidence in Landscape. 

Allowing that Guare doesn’t deal in the realities that Foote does, it’s not entirely fair to compare the two in all aspects, but when Guare goes off into his Dadaistic world, like in House of Blue Leaves or the one-act Day for Surprises, you go along with him, accepting the absurdities and non sequiturs as parts of that world. 

Landscape is just incredible—in the sense of ‘not credible.’  The coincidences are too silly to be world-shaking, the characters are all too eccentric to be anything but that—eccentric (as opposed to somehow following the dictates of a parallel reality).  There are too many of them thrown into the situation, as if Guare had all these queer folk left over from past scripts and decided to use them all up in one fell swoop. 

And too many of the main quirks assigned to each character seemed irrelevant, as if they were just selected to make us ask, ‘What’s going on here?’ but without ever answering the question.  The (male) travel agent boss, Raulito (Bernard White), wears a gold lamé evening gown . . . because when he was growing up in Cuba, he thought that’s how all rich Americans dressed (ooookaaaay).  But what’s the dramatic point of that?  So he can get shot in an apparent bank robbery wearing the dress?  Why? 

The nutsy southern (and why does he have to be southern—because they’re all nutsy somehow?) suitor, Durwood Peach (Jonathan Fried), is allowed to leave the protection of his clinic and grand estate back home to come up to woo Betty, with the blessing of both his mother and . . . his wife.  Why?  Because the only way to get Betty out of his system is to let him make the trip—alone, with thousands of bucks in cash. 

And of course, Betty (Lili Taylor) goes back south with him.  Why?  Just so she can leave her 14-year-old son, Bert (Stephen Scott Scarpulla—and what’s with all these three-part names nowadays, anyway?), home alone so the plot can happen the way Guare wants it to. 

That’s basically all it amounts to—a way to get the plot on track.  All the craziness of the suitor doesn’t accomplish much else, except provide some hoops for the actor to jump through (rather well, I must say, in this case).

The big theatrical coup of Landscape is that the characters sing.  It’s not a musical in the conventional sense, but the main characters all come down front several times and sing.  Rosalie (Sherie Rene Scott), the dead sister (yeah, that’s right) was a nightclub chanteuse wannabe, so she hovers around in a white satin gown, à la Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, and sings her torch songs; Betty contributes several ballads; and Bert does a big rock number that Brantley thought was the bomb.  (Poor Scarpulla, his raspy voice, obviously still in the throes of the change, was almost too painful to listen to.  I wanted to reach for a cough drop just out of sympathy.) 

Guare wrote the lyrics and music, and I guess that’s an accomplishment in itself, but I never felt the singing really did anything for the play either theatrically or dramatically.  It was a gimmick, as far as I was concerned.  (Everybody’s gotta have one, you know.)  Reminded me of the bit about the dog who reads the newspaper: It’s not a matter of how well he does it, but the fact that he does it at all.  So, it didn’t matter how effective the songs are, but that Guare wrote them and inserted them into his play.  Harrumph!

I never really figured out what Guare was on about in Landscape.  I was a little embarrassed when a small group of spectators seated next to my friend Diana and me—Diana having gone off to the convenience—turned to me after discussing their confusion among themselves and asked what I thought the play was about.  I couldn’t answer. 

(I actually thought briefly of lying and making up an answer.  I’d been a grad student in theater, for Pete’s sake—I could certainly come up with some bullshit or other.  I decided on a sheepish grimace of shared confusion and left it at that.  Brave soul that I am.) 

Brantley says things like “‘Landscape’ identifies the human condition as an almost unbearable wistfulness,” that it “locat[es] the loneliness in the celebrity-besotted American culture of the late 20th century” and “identifies the unbearable wistfulness of being.”  What does any of that MEAN? 

As directed by Michael Greif, according to Brantley, Guare is illustrating the “obsession with fabulous fame and conspicuous wealth, qualities perceived as infinitely desirable and equally unobtainable” in America, “a lyrical and sordid world where tabloid prurience has become a religion.” 

Okay, maybe he is—but that seems a slight and well-worn point that can’t really bear up under the weight of so much contrivance, I don’t think.  I didn’t see the play in ’77, but I remember when it played at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and I remember feeling that it wasn’t anything I wanted to see.  I probably should have remembered that feeling.

'The Hot Wing King'

All right, tell the truth. 

Aren’t hot wings and Buffalo wings the same things?  I mean, really—they’re both made from the usually-discarded part of the bird, the part that mostly ends up in the soup pot; they’re both cooked up crisp and then covered in a spicy sauce; most people like to dip them in another sauce like blue cheese or ranch; and almost everyone who eats them, eats them in a bar or in the living room with a big game like the Super Bowl on TV.

In fact there are so many recipes for both chicken wing snacks—scores, maybe even hundreds—that it’s probably impossible to distinguish hot wings from Buffalo wings.  As far as I can determine, the main difference—if it’s even accurate—is that the basis of the hot sauce for Buffalo wings is cayenne pepper and for hot wings it’s chili peppers.

The only real difference is that Buffalo wings were invented in Buffalo, New York, and hot wings come from down south; Memphis, Tennessee, is the hot-wing capital of the country, in terms of the number of raw wings sold and cooked ones consumed, though whether they were first concocted there is arguable.

Almost inarguable is that Buffalo wings, the ones people dip in the blue cheese sauce, were introduced in 1964 in a bar.  Hot wings, the ones dipped in ranch dressing (though not always), showed up in Memphis around 1990, sold from a food truck (and 1992 in a restaurant).  An annual hot-wing festival in April began in Memphis in 2002; a Buffalo wing festival started in 2001.

But if you press the point of which town really served the first spicy chicken wings—you might well find yourself in a . . . well, heated argument, let’s say.  (If you want to argue whose wings are better . . . well, that’s probably not a real good idea.)

According to the hot-wing chef in Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King, though, his family recipe for the dish dates back to 1808.  Oh, and he comes from Saint Louis—though I don’t know that he wasn’t born in Memphis, where the play is set.

According to the website This Week in New York, Hall was moved to write The Hot Wing King, her third and last production of her Residency 5 at the Signature Theatre Company, in part because of that annual festival, the Southern Hot Wing Festival, in Memphis, her hometown (about which she writes frequently).  The festival includes a hot-wing cooking competition which is central to the play and initiates the events that unfold.

Hall, 38, a playwright, writer, actress, and social and political activist, was born in Memphis.  According to an interview in Art Works Blog, a website of the National Endowment for the Arts, Hall’s parents told stories around the dinner table, recounting their day at work and playing all the characters, and she credits this practice for her attraction to theater.  “It was like watching one-person shows at the kitchen table.”  As a girl, she staged plays in her family’s living room.

In 1999, she graduated from Craigmont High School in Memphis as the first African-American valedictorian.  After high school, Hall attended New York City’s Columbia University, graduating in 2003 with a major in African-American Studies and Creative Writing.  She was awarded top departmental honors from the university’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). 

In 2005, she graduated from the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University with a Master of Fine Arts in Acting, and then spent two years as an actress in New York, working on stage and in TV.  She then entered the Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace playwriting program, graduating in 2009.

Hall’s been a book reviewer, journalist (another form of storytelling), and essayist for publications such as the Boston Globe, Essence, Newsweek and the New York Times.  She’s also been a Kennedy Center Playwriting Fellow at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center of Waterford, Connecticut.

She’s probably best known as the author of The Mountaintop, her play about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last night before his assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968, which premièred in London in 2009 to great critical acclaim.  The Mountaintop opened on Broadway on 13 October 2011, starring Samuel L. Jackson (in his Broadway début) as King and Angela Bassett as a mysterious maid.  Directed by Kenny Leon, it ran 117 regular performances and 24 previews, closing on 22 January 2012.

Hall is also the book-writer, with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, the current juke-boxer that opened in November at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.  Other work includes Hurt Village (2012; currently in development as a feature film to be Hall’s film-directing début) and Our Lady of Kibeho (2014), Hall’s previous Residency 5 offerings at STC, and Children of Killers (2011). (Signature’s Residency 5 guarantees each playwright three productions of new plays over the course of a five-year residency.)

Hall has very strong socio-political views; race and ethnicity are often elemental to her dramaturgy.  The dramatist tries to represent the African-America community in her plays and promotes or celebrates social change. 

When, while taking an acting class at Columbia, Hall’s  teacher told the class to find plays with characters who looked like them, Hall and her scene partner, another young Southern black woman, searched the university library to no avail.  There were no plays with two black women in the cast, so Hall thought: “I have to write those plays, then.  I have to carry that baton forward and write us into existence because if I don’t who else will?"

In 2017, she was named artistic director of the Hattiloo Theater, an African-American repertory theater in Memphis dedicated to “the diversity of black expression.”  Hall said “she hopes to help bring about ‘a renaissance, a revitalization of the arts in Memphis.’”   Hall’s dedication to her city and her heritage is expressed in a comment she made at the time: “Everything that Memphis is, is represented  in my art.”

Hall’s awards include a Laurence Olivier Award, Susan Smith Blackburn Award, Lark Play Development Center Playwrights of New York (PONY) Fellowship, Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship, two Lecompte du Nouy Prizes from Lincoln Center, Fellowship of Southern Writers Bryan Family Award in Drama, NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship, and the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award.  Hall was shortlisted for the London Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award and received the Otis Guernsey New Voices Playwriting Award from the William Inge Theatre Festival.  She is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Ron Brown Scholar Program, and the Coca-Cola Scholar Program. 

The world première of The Hot Wing King began performances at the Pershing Square Signature Center’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, the company’s 191-seat proscenium house, on 11 February 2020; the production, directed by Hall’s collaborator, Steven H. Broadnax, III, opened on 1 March.  I caught the 7:30 p.m. performance on Friday, 6 March.  After one extension for the originally announced final performance on 15 March, Hot Wing King was scheduled to close on 22 March, but the coronavirus pandemic caused Signature to cease all performances after 11 March.

In the Memphis house owned by Dwayne (Korey Jackson), a successful hotel manager, Cordell (Toussaint Jeanlouis) is preparing the ingredients for the town’s annual hot-wing contest.  He’s sure he has a good chance of winning the $5,000 prize this year with a new recipe, “Cajun Alfredo with Bourbon-Infused Crumbled Bacon”—especially with the help of his friends Dwayne, Isom (Sheldon Best), and Big Charles (Nicco Annan).  The four African-American men are all gay and Cordell is Dwayne’s housemate and lover.

Two months ago, the forty-ish Cordell left his wife, two sons, and job as a FedEx executive in St.  Louis to move in with Dwayne.  His wife won’t sign the divorce papers and Cordell hasn’t been able to find a job in Memphis and he feels a little like a kept man in Dwayne’s house—not that Dwayne, an eminently reasonable and thoughtful man, has said or done anything to give this impression

Cordell’s team, the New Wing Order, who gather for this occasion every year—Cordell has entered before, but never won—consists of his and Dwayne’s closest friends who treat the occasion as a special event for the four of them.  Isom, in his thirties and the youngest of the group, is an outright flamer, femmy, outrageous, and funny; when Dwayne gives the men special team shirts for the contest, Isom adds glitter to his and cuts the bottom off to reveal his midriff.  (The costumes are the work of Emilio Sosa, who seems to have had the most fun with Isom’s garb.)  During the first scene, sports-loving Big Charles keeps running back to the TV in the living room to check on a game in progress while Cordell is organizing the prep in the kitchen. 

The whole process is almost-organized chaos, and supplies the comedy for Hall’s bifurcated play: half sit-com and half family drama.  The cracks in Dwayne and Cordell’s relationship are a hint of the drama to come, and it gets a boost from the arrival of Dwayne’s former brother-in-law, TJ (Eric B. Robinson, Jr.).  TJ’s a drug-dealer and small-time crook.  He was married to Dwayne’s sister, an emotionally disturbed woman who died while under police restraint and Dwayne feels guilty because he had called the cops when she was having an episode.

TJ’s come by to leave a package of money for his son, sixteen-year-old Everett, known as “EJ” (Cecil Blutcher), who shows up himself asking to stay with his uncle.  Dwayne’s guilt over the death of EJ’s mother, which the boy witnessed, compels him to look on the boy as his responsibility; he wants his nephew to live with him and Cordell—though Cordell has misgivings about the prospect.  EJ’s also a high school basketball star and Cordell, a former Georgetown Hoya b-ball player, tries to bond with his lover’s nephew over a little one-on-one on the backyard court.

The Hot Wing King shifts between the sit-com manicness of the cooking contest, which takes place mostly in the up-left kitchen of Michael Carnahan’s open-walled set, and the melodrama of the extended-family situation, which happens in the rest of the house, including the up-right bedroom, meant to be upstairs, that EJ will occupy, and the down-left back terrace where the basketball hoop is located.  The living room, fittingly at center stage, is neutral territory where scenes from both the cooking comedy and the family drama play out.

The two parts of the play do cross over some, but TJ is pretty much exclusively involved in the family plot, though his son enters the cooking comedy near the end of the play when Dwayne makes him an honorary member of the New Wing Order.  Big Charles and Isom stick mostly to the cooking scenario—Isom takes an action that effects the outcome of the competition, but I won’t reveal it now (though Hall telegraphs it long before its repercussions are seen); only Dwayne and Cordell are really part of both elements of The Hot Wing King. 

This isn’t the kind of play in which any real disaster occurs; the most dramatic thing to happen to Dwayne’s circle is the result of the hot-wing contest (which I also won’t reveal).  In the end, everyone is accommodated, even the criminally-inclined TJ.  What Hall’s writing about isn’t the hot-wing contest or the conflict among Dwayne, TJ, and EJ; the play’s also not about the potential conflict between Dwayne and Cordell (who never actually brings up his concerns to Dwayne). 

In addition to the Memphis hot-wing festival, Hall also drew inspiration for The Hot Wing King from the relationship of her brother and his lover, but the play isn’t really about gay men, black men, or gay black men; neither gayness nor race is an issue: the first is only mentioned a few times more or less in passing and the second not at all.  The Hot Wing King’s about how these guys, who are mostly unrelated to one another, make a family. 

I can’t tell you much detail, at least not cogently, about Katori Hall’s Hot Wing King.  The production, which ran two hours and 20 minutes with one intermission, was well done, and the acting was fine . . . but I couldn’t understand about two-thirds of what anyone was saying!

The problem I had—and I really hate to put this into words—is that they spoke in Southern black colloquialisms, like code.  One reviewer called it “the vibrant dialect of black Memphis,” and, from their laughter, it seemed most of the rest of the audience got the idiom.

It wasn’t a serious drawback for me when two of the men were just talking—then I could understand them fine.  (These scenes had another problem, though it wasn’t about comprehension, but believability.)  When the guys are all together and runnin’ off at the mouth, which they do a lot, it was just all gobbledygook to me.  I couldn’t even distinguish individual words—or even individual speakers!  

I can tell what Hall’s main theme for the play is; that really comes out in the quieter one-on-one scenes.  It’s not a bad point—but I had to sit through all the incomprehensible scenes of code-talk while Hall and her characters make it. 

As I said, however, Broadnax’s production was fine aside from this problem—which, I suppose, was at least partly my failing for not knowing the characters’ vernacular.  (I wasn’t the only spectator with this difficulty.  Michael Sommers of New York Stage Review remarked, “Frankly, some of the deeply Southern-fried lingo escaped my old Eastern Seaboard ears . . . .”)  Perhaps the director could have found a way to accommodate the old, white Northerners like me without sacrificing the veracity—or verisimilitude is maybe a more accurate word—of the characters and milieu, but I’m not convinced he could have. 

I would never say, though, that the actors were anything less than convincing either in their characterizations of the six Memphians or in their use of the local argot.  The cast as a whole, especially the four New Wing Order members, formed a true mini-community, a club to which they all belonged.  Another word for this might be . . . family.

The only times that this sense of closeness and familiarity is strained is when the play waxes serious.  In those moments, Hall wrote the characters dialogue that’s hyper poetic and lofty—the polar opposite of the local patois.  The tonal shift doesn’t quite work smoothly, and as much as the actors worked to make the sober scenes sound like conversation, the dialogue kept coming out as epigraphs. 

(In his New York Times review of Hall’s play, Ben Brantley, who had a complaint similar to mine, quotes one example of this shift in diction.  This is Cordell speaking to Dwayne: “I see why you steady [sic] treat me like a child.  I am.  It’s like I’ve just been pushed out of the womb and I’m getting hit with the cold and the air and the lights and the truth.”)

As in any good ensemble play, all the actors performed at the same level of excellence.  Even in the scenes which I had a hard time understanding, I had no difficulty feeling that the actors understood one another completely, playing off (and with) one another like the close and fond friends they were supposed to be.  The quality of the cast and the work of Broadnax was not in doubt.

Singling out a few for the significance of their roles, either for their function in the plot or the character challenge Hall gave them, I compliment Korey Jackson for making Dwayne the levelheaded stalwart he is.  Jackson makes him unquestionably the pater of this ad hoc familias, keeping everyone on an even keel.  The actor keeps Dwayne outwardly on control, even as he lets us see the turmoil he’s feeling inside.

As his partner, Cordell, Toussaint Jeanlouis conveys his seriousness about making his hot wings, no matter how lightly anyone else may take the task.  He can seem as even-tempered as Dwayne, but he’s far more fragile, and Toussaint lets this out at times then hides it away at others.  As Isom, the most flamboyant character in The Hot Wing King, Sheldon Best plays the hell out of his character; it’s hard to tell who’s having more fun, Best or Isom.  He literally light ups the stage and makes the most of Sosa’s costumes.

Best is also one of the two darlings of reviewers in Broadnax’s production.  The other is Cecil Blutcher, making his Off-Broadway début as the young EJ.  Now, Blutcher is considerably older than EJ, and the extra maturity and self-control shows in the way the actor conveys EJ’s confusion and hurt over the death of his mother and his father’s less-than conscientious parenting and his own wish to go down a different path than TJ.  In Blutcher’s hands, EJ’s outbursts and recriminations still indicate an underlying yearning and even goodness.  The actor’s delivery of a horrifying speech describing his mother’s shooting reveals a lot about EJ and his troubled demeanor.

I’ve already described Michael Carnahan’s set, which comprised four playing areas (in descending order of activity: kitchen, living room, back yard patio, and upstairs bedroom).  One reviewer, Marilyn Stasio of Variety, thought the concept was superfluous, but I (like most of the published reviewers) found it well used and practical in terms of an acting environment, not to mention a fine visual representation of Dwayne’s comfortable, un-showy, middle-class lifestyle.  (The kitchen incidentally, is practical and the men actually cook the sauce on stage—so the Griffin is filled with the aroma of cooking hot-wing sauce.)

Sosa’s costumes did the same thing for the characters: display each one’s personality and way of presenting themselves to the world in an unobtrusive (well, except for Isom’s flashy dress) way.  Alan C. Edwards’s lighting nicely isolates or integrates the different playing areas as needed while still allowing us to be aware that this is a home, not a series of rooms.  (Carnahan’s open walls go a long way to establishing this from preset; though we know there are “walls” there, no room is unconnected from any other.)

I’ve collected a dozen reviews of The Hot Wing King to survey.  Brantley in the Times acknowledged that the play “has its problems” but continued that “this likable but lumpy production . . . is never better than when its all-male ensemble is functioning as an awkward but interdependent unit.”  The characters “have that palpable, physical ease with one another, both contented and irritable, that comes from being part of a family.”  Hall, Brantley contended, “is asking what constitutes a family in a world of fragmentation.”  He added that the core characters are gay “allows Hall to challenge conventional definitions of manhood and fatherhood in black America,” using “the bright, peppy context of a classical sitcom structure to do so.” 

“The balance between social soap opera and buoyant comedy isn’t always gracefully sustained,” reported the Timesman, further noting, “Nor is the script able to comfortably fold its more somber subplots into the running, frantic story of the cooking contest.”  Furthermore, Brantley found, “When characters . . . talk about their deeper feelings, they tend to shift into improbably poetic flights of diction.” 

“What’s refreshing here is the matter-of-fact depiction of black gay characters who may be dissatisfied, to varying degrees, with their own behavior but not, ultimately, because of their sexuality,” asserted the Times reviewer. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout, quipping that “Katori Hall’s plays remind me of a sign I once saw over the front door of an unpretentious little restaurant: ‘NOT FANCY, BUT GOOD,’” observed that “there's nothing fancy about the down-to-earth dramaturgy of Ms. Hall's kitchen-sink chronicles of family life in all its varied aspects.” 

All she does—if “all” is the word—is tell stories about ordinary men and women who, as Jack Webb said of the characters in “Dragnet,” sound “as real as a guy pouring a cup of coffee.”  Yet truth gushes out every time they open their mouths, and before you know it, you’re caught up in their lives and fates.

Teachout dubbed Hall “one of the best playwrights we have,” and labeled The Hot Wing King “her finest play yet.”  After describing the situations in Hall’s script, the WSJ review-writer explained that “while ‘The Hot Wing King’ starts off playing the resulting complications for belly laughs, they end up being deeply, darkly serious.” 

Variety’s Stasio warned would-be theatergoers, “Good luck trying to follow the meandering plot of ‘The Hot Wing King,’” which she labels a “good-natured kitchen comedy.”  Stasio asserted, “Director Steve H. Broadnax III gets the best results when he keeps everybody and his uncle squished into the narrow kitchen.” 

The Variety reviewer continued, “Those crowd scenes work so well, you wonder why Hall . . . and her design team even bothered with the superfluous settings of a living room and an upstairs bedroom.  It certainly wasn’t demanded by the loose-limbed plot,” Stasio felt.  “Although it presents itself as a gay sitcom, the ‘sit’ isn’t sturdy enough to sustain the ‘com,’ which actually comes from the extremely likable characters.”

On TheaterScene.com, Julia Polinsky declared, “The play pushes all kinds of buttons and does it well.  Humor, anger, resentment, ambition, family, love, commitment: it’s all there, alternating between hilarious and searing.”  Polinsky reported that Hall “has written The Hot Wing King in a rapid-fire, delicious-sounding vernacular, which helps the play feel completely natural.”  The playwright “knows how to make you care as deeply about these men as Cordell cares about his wings,” felt the review-writer.  “Which is particularly interesting, because the basic story is pretty well-worn.”  Polinsky made some pertinent observations:

Lacking the milieu of gay African-American men, The Hot Wing King could be almost tedious—yawn, again?  The wayward teenage son looking for redemption?  The couple that’s uncomfortable with one person’s sacrifice and the other’s controlling behavior?  The friends, one warmhearted and wise, the other giddy and silly?  Sorry, but what’s new?  Been there, done that; let’s move on.  But Hall’s vivid characterizations and superb language, coupled with outstanding performances and terrific direction from Steve H. Broadnax III, makes The Hot Wing King feel fresh and new.  Not to mention, the knockout scenic design . . . and costumes that effortlessly create character . . . make it all work.  Really well.  Really, really well.

The reviewer concluded with the admonition: “Those tears in your eyes at The Hot Wing King?  They might be from the heat of some Suicide Flats, or from the heart of this tale of ambition, love, family, and Pili-Pili powder.” 

Labeling The Hot Wing King a “delectable new play,” James Wilson on Talkin’ Broadway remarked: “It is not uncommon for a theater production to appeal to the visual and aural senses, but it is rare that a show gets people talking about the enticing smells.”  Wilson quickly added, “To its credit, The Hot Wing King has abundant pleasures beyond its attention to aromatic detail.  Hall,” he reported, “artfully mixes a heaping dose of comedy, a dollop of sentimentality, and a dash of social commentary to create a rich and satisfying theater experience.” 

The TB reviewer lamented that the play “sometimes drifts into broad and formulaic situation-comedy mode, but the actors skillfully inject the characters . . . with complex humanity.”  He caviled a bit that, “[r]unning nearly two and a half hours, the play arrives a little overdone,” backing off, however, because “[t]here are a lot of laughs.”  Compared to other recent black-themed plays, Wilson asserted, “Hall’s The Hot Wing King does not push the boundaries of theatrical form and style in ways that other shows have, but it is certainly a viable contender.”  He concluded, “In its unabashed treatment of sexuality, masculinity and race, it is a play to be applauded and savored.”

On TheaterScene.net (not affiliated with the above-cited TheaterScene.com), Darryl Reilly labeled Hall’s play “uplifting” and said it’s “where comedy and drama deftly converge.”  He proclaimed it a “rewarding contemporary work.”  The reviewer praised “Hall’s gorgeous dialogue” as “a compendium of punchy lingo, colloquialisms and everyday realism,” and found, “Her command of structure is impeccable as the events unfold with force, suspense and insight.” 

Reilly labeled Broadnax’s staging “sharp,” Carnahan’s set design “artful,” Edwards’s lighting “adroit,” sound designers Luqman Brown and Robert Kaplowitz’s effects “sparkling,” and Sosa’s costumes “stylish.”  In conclusion, he affirmed, “The Hot Wing King’s accomplished depth continues to substantiate Hall’s preeminence as a leading playwright.”

The Hot Wing King “is a moderately heartwarming, sometimes amusing, occasionally clichéd dramedy with sitcom overtones,” declared Samuel L. Leiter on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side.  “Performed under Steve H. Broadnax III’s buoyant direction, with raucous energy,” Leiter complained, “Balancing sitcom business and darker issues is a precarious endeavor that the play doesn’t always master.”  The “jokes and bickering” that dominate the first part of the play until “[e]ventually, more serious personal matters intrude” forces “a tonal shift.” 

The work of the design team, Leiter wrote, “go far to making The Hot Wing King tasty, although not quite enough to sustain a two hour and 20 minute meal.”  The actors “definitely make The Hot Wing King a sweet-tasting, if not particularly hot, concoction that many will enjoy,” but Leiter, like me, warned that “many listeners . . . will find themselves depending more on the expressive acting than the words spoken to follow along closely.” 

Zachary Stewart characterized The Hot Wing King as “a sensitive portrait of black masculinity, and the tension that can arise between fathers and sons when they don't see eye-to-eye,” on TheaterMania.  “The linguistic richness of The Hot Wing King makes it particularly delicious to hear,” affirmed Stewart. 

Through clever wordplay, shameless vowel substitution, and ’90s pop music references, these men have developed a vernacular that feels central to their identities as individuals and cohesion as a community. 

“Steve H. Broadnax III has directed a snappy production that seamlessly slides back and forth over the border between comedy and drama,” reported the TM reviewer.  Stewart praised Carnahan’s set, but he declared Sosa’s costumes “brilliant.”  The reviewer’s final comment was: “But as both a comedy and a drama, The Hot Wing King is quite filling, and will leave you with a satisfying aftertaste days later.”

On New York Theatre Guide, Stanford Friedman called Hall’s play “a tasty new work” that “comes in three flavors.” 

As directed by Steve H. Broadnax III, it is a classic buddy comedy with friends and lovers involved in bouts of physical tomfoolery and good-natured ribbing.  It is also a honey-glazed drama seasoned with uncertainty and dipped in guilt.  And it is a hot take on sons and fathers, biological and otherwise, in black America . . . .

“Saucy.  Spicy.  One hardly needs to be an experienced theater critic for these adjectives to pop into one’s head during the prolonged opening section of Katori Hall’s The Hot Wing King.”  So asserted Brian Scott Lipton at the top of his Theater Pizzazz review—and then added, “The other word that popped into my critical head, however, was ‘surprising.’” 

Hall . . . is usually a writer of substance, so I didn’t expect her to simply pen an extended sitcom.  And Hall doesn’t disappoint.  The play suddenly makes a sharp tonal turn, and while the laughs don’t completely disappear, much of the next two hours is devoted to a dramatic and stunningly realistic exploration of several different kinds of male relationships.

The TP review-writer concluded: “Like a good hot wing, the play ends up having not just fire, but remarkable depth and flavor, all of which is brought out to perfection by an incredibly talented cast under Steve H. Broadnax III’s assured direction.”

Melissa Rose Bernardo, in the first of two notices for New York Stage Review, revealed, “It sounds hard to believe given the title, but The Hot Wing King is, at its core, not really a play about hot wings.”  Bernardo explained that “the wing-ding is really just a pretext . . . to bring together this group of men.”  The source of the drama?  Bernardo affirmed that “there’s no recipe, and there are no step-by-step instructions, for Dwayne and Cordell’s relationship.  Like the rest of us, they’ll just have to wing it.”

In NYSR review number two, Michael Sommers labeled the play “[f]requently a laugh out loud new comedy,” then explained, “On its occasionally serious side, the good-natured play considers a couple of issues that probably confront many an adult male relationship today.”  Sommers pronounced the première “smart and sassy” and called Hall “ever-astonishing.”  The second NYSR reviewer pointed out that Hall “develops the likable story” by “cunningly entwin[ing] thoughtful matters with some fairly broad comedy.” 

“A playful though ultimately sincere dramedy with an upbeat viewpoint, dynamic characters, and a happy ending,” reported Sommers, “The Hot Wing King is agreeably performed by a company of tiptop actors who appear highly natural and easy in their intimate interactions.”  The review-writer praised Sosa’s costumes and found that Broadnax “has done quite a capable job in guiding his company through the play’s changing emotional subtleties.”  He concluded that the play, which he found “sweet” and “relatively easygoing,” “delivers a worthy American story for today that is composed, produced, and performed with considerable intelligence and charm.”

*  *  *  *

DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC, THE HOT WING KING  ENDED ITS RUN AT THE SIGNATURE THEATRE COMPANY ON 11 MARCH 2020

'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