“Cambodian Rock Band”: Day 5, Play 6, Theatre Eddys Goes to the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Lauren Yee, with Songs by Dengue Fever

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 Bandcontinues through October 27, 2019 in the Thomas Theatre as part of the 2019 Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Tickets are available at www.osfashland.org.