Cambodian Rock Band
Lauren Yee, with Songs by Dengue Fever
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| Joe Ngo, Abraham Kim, Brooke Ishibashi, Jane Lui & Moses Villarama |
A play about family displacement, trauma, and massive
genocide is not a play one would normally expect often to laugh, to tap one’s
foot to rock music, or to walk out feeling uplifted and inspired. But when the play is written by Lauren Yee,
what else could be expected since the prolific, much-honored playwright often
tackles difficult subjects while still finding humor and heart in the direst of
situations. As is said about her in the
current Oregon Shakespeare’s Illuminations,
“She likes to insert a spoonful of laughter with the tears.”
The subject of her latest play, Cambodian Rock Band, is the murder of an estimated three million
Cambodian citizens – men, women, children – during the years of Khmer Rouge
dictatorship, 1975 – 1979. While Lauren
Yee does not steer away from a realistic taste of the horrors, she couples that
examination with the important, little-known history and rich tradition of
Cambodian rock music. During the
horrific, five years of the genocide, ninety percent of Cambodia’s artists and
musicians died, with much of the music itself also destroyed. But in the subsequent years since, much has
been rediscovered through recorded tapes that were hidden; and it is that music
that Cambodian Rock Band honors.
Lauren Yee uses the upbeat, contagious, hard-beat Cambodian mixture
born in American rock ‘n roll, blues, and funk both to contrast the unspeakable
tragedies of genocide as well as to highlight the indomitable spirit of
survival of the Cambodian people themselves.
Cambodian Rock Band is her
tribute – using in part the native language of the victims and survivors alike –
of a people and a culture that not only survived a near-complete genocide but have
learned once again how to thrive. The
lens of her story is one family among hundreds of thousands that was near
annihilated in those few years and whose story went largely untold to the next
generation – that is until one American-born daughter of Cambodian parents decides
to return to their country to seek justice for all the families lost.
Neary is part of a group of lawyers who in 2008 are in
Cambodia building a case against Duch, a Khmer Rouge official of the infamous
prison S21who is awaiting trial for overseeing the torture and deaths of almost
20,000 innocents. While there are seven
known survivors, there is rumor of an eighth; and Neary thinks there is a good
chance that person can be found before what will be the first trial of any KR
implementers of the genocide.
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| Brooke Ishibashi & Joe Ngo |
To her surprise and consternation, her father, Chum,
suddenly shows up just days before an important hearing at her hotel in Phnom
Penh. This is particularly suspicious
because Chum is a man who has never shown much interest in his homeland or in
fact, in anything Cambodian. Why he is
there soon becomes clear as he in futility tries to persuade Neary to give up
her investigation of Duch’s atrocities, both believing the present government
will never convict Duch and also fearing for her safety when he or other former
Khmer Rouge members come to see revenge on her.
As she pushes her dad to talk more about a life in Cambodia he has never
shared with her, she finally realizes the picture her team has of the eighth
survivor is actually none other than her father, Chum. When he refuses to tell her any details, she
leaves him alone at the hotel, going to find out for herself what he must have
experienced during his time at S21.
For all his past horrors and losses, the Chum we meet is a
heavy-accented man who bears a constant, big-toothed grin and who appears to
find immense excitement and joy in the simplest things (like fish that eat dead
skin from his feet). As Chum, Joe Ngo – an
actor whose own parents are Khmer Rouge survivors – continually sends his voice
on a rollercoaster ride through all possible vocal scales, riding the ups and
downs quite gleefully with paused emphasis on words when Chum wants to make a
special point to his somewhat exasperated, nonplused daughter. After she leaves him to parts unknown, Chum
decides to start sending her voice messages with pieces of his story in return
for hints where she has gone, reenacting their own version of “Let’s Make a
Deal” that they used to play together when she was a child.
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| Joe Ngo |
Chum then begins to relive where he was that fateful
Cambodian New Years Day, 1975, taking us back to the night when the Khmer Rouge
ousted the legitimate government and showing us what happened to him once
captured, imprisoned, and tortured in S21. As we soon learn what Neary has never known,
Chum was actually the electric guitar player of a five-person rock group called
the Cyclos. Through his memories, we listen to the recording session his band
was in the midst of making as the tanks and bombs arrived.
For all its lyrics in Khmer, the music has a beat and sound
we Americans readily recognize as the band rocks in Dengue Fever’s “1000 Tears
of a Tarantula.” As the noise of the
approaching helicopters and tanks begin to shake them and us, the band realizes
they only have one more number to play together, providing wild intensity to
Dengue Fever’s “Cement Slippers” while adding stomps and desperate looks at
each other as they sing and play for their very lives. All along, we now watch Joe Ngo as a young
Chum, realizing immediately that his high energy for life and ability to smile
through whatever life deals him have both been with him for a lifetime.
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| Daisuke Tsuji |
As the band now plays and even before as the story of Chum’s
arrival unfolded before us, a strikingly handsome, immaculately dressed man
with friendly grins and an outward charm has watched the proceedings,
occasionally breaking in to make telling comments to us as the audience. Earlier on, he has told us, “Even when I am
not here, I am here ... watching, watching ... Welcome to my show.” The suave, smooth-talker is none other than the
notorious and now-accused Duch himself, played with a chilling, calm sense of being
fully in control by Daisuke Tsuji (alternating the role throughout the season
with James Ryen).
As Chum’s recounting moves to the room where he is tied and bound
to a chair in S21, we learn first-hand what it must mean to be alone as a
prisoner who is being tortured daily by cruel, heartless questioners for a
crime never revealed to him. Joe Ngo’s
performance is painful to watch while at the same time, we can only deeply
admire the actor’s ability to capture some small part of what tens of thousands
underwent during those years.
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| Daisuke Tsuji & Moses Villarama |
His chief interrogator, Leng, has connections and a story
with special and surprising significance to Chum, with Moses Villarama
providing his own chilling performance that brings with it some element of
sympathy that we as audience cannot believe we want to bestow upon him. Duch, a former mathematics teacher of kids,
himself is now an active character and not just an observer in this, his
chamber of horror. Daisuke Tsuji
continues to find ways to make almost human this most monstrous of a man whose desperate
and unsuccessful search for sleep racks his very being and has special significance
for his prisoner, Chum. The two for a
moment find some common ground of understanding when the condemned Chum sings
to his soon-to-be executioner in a deeply affecting, low, and guttural voice Bob
Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changing.”
Besides playing the mighty-voiced singer Sothea, Brooke
Ishibashi is also Neary, the mission-driven, serious-minded daughter of Chum. Her outward impatience with her dad hides
effectively the love that she in the end proves is very much there. Her own search for her father’s Cambodian
roots leads her to a life-changing night, one where she is joined by her father
as Lauren Yee’s play also explores father-daughter dynamics in a climax where
both actors further prove their mettle in a stunning, heart-touching scene.
Chay Yew directs the ongoing back-and-forth interaction of
music and story, with each part providing its own important, independent
narrative while fully supporting that of the other. Takeshi Kata’s scenic design provides a
backdrop of vivid signage markings of a modern Phnom Penh as well as the
neighborhood back streets of an earlier city on the brink of takeover. The design of S21 is abruptly stark, with the
lighting of David Weiner adding the non-forgiving blight of a room of no
good. However, the lighting he extends
each performance of the Cyclos has all the flash and blink of a rock concert,
which of course is in part what this incredible evening of theater is all about.
Mikhail Fiksel’s sound design is a huge
player in the evening’s success and impact, not only in balancing the blend of
instruments and voices, but also in the many effects of approaching war and the
terror of imprisonment. Finally, Sara
Ryung Clement’s costumes bring an impressive authenticity to times, events, and
personalities.
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| The Cyclos |
The eleven Cambodian rock songs are performed by the five of
the show’s six actors: Joe Ngo (Chum), Moses Villarama (Leng and Neary’s
boyfriend, Ted), Brooke Ishibashi (Neary and Sothea), Abraham Kim (Cyclos
member, Rom), and Jane Lui (Cyclos member, Pou).
As pictures of only a few of the millions of victims slowly
populate a screen behind the band, its members take the stage a final time to
remind us in triumphant style that in their memory, Cambodian music once again
is stirring hearts and creating smiles.
Audience members rise to their seats, exhausted on the one hand by this
harrowing story while rejoicing with high energy on the other hand a family’s
history now shared and a music’s tradition now finally a part of all our lives.
Rating: 5 E
Cambodian Rock Band
continues through October 27, 2019 in the Thomas Theatre as part of the 2019
Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Tickets are available at www.osfashland.org.
Photos
by Jenny Graham
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