East West Players’ “Cambodian Rock Band” essentially tore up the stage of the David Hwang Theater in Los Angeles while wrapping up its extended run last weekend. An explosive blend of music and storytelling both humorous and harrowing, Lauren Yee’s play as directed by Chay Yew is the kind of performance you don’t want to end, and which may never leave you.
With pulsating songs by L.A. and Long Beach-based band Dengue Fever — rooted in 1960s-style Cambodian rock/pop with melodic rhythms and infectious harmonies — “Cambodian Rock Band” straddles the past and present in telling the story of a man reconciling with his justice-seeking American daughter what happened to him in a mid-1970s Khmer Rouge torture prison.
Yee’s brilliant blending of humor and playful narration takes the edge off Chum’s (Joe Ngo) still traumatic account of his time at S-21, a prison directed by Comrade Duch (Daisuke Tsuji), pronounced “doik,” and who, interestingly enough, is our narrator here.
When we meet them, Chum’s daughter Neary (Kelsey Angel Baehrens) has been in Cambodia for two years working for a human-rights organization to find the few S-21 survivors and convict Duch of contributing to genocide.
Chum suddenly shows up to her hotel room, having flown in on a moment’s notice and risking the wrath of his wife for maxing out his credit card, seemingly trying to distract Neary from her mission of finding an eighth survivor she has uncovered from the prison archives.
Meanwhile, prison-master Duch himself is talking to us in a suave and amusing way about how he was just a math teacher trying to help the new government do the right thing. He steps aside while Chum and Neary interact, saying he’ll be back later, but still observes from the sidelines and even joins in with the band with cool, smooth dance moves while shaking small maracas.
For throughout this story, the band Cyclos (pronounced “see-close”) provides a rocking live soundtrack from the stage—with rhythmic, melodic, tambourine-inflected, sometimes psychedelic and beyond catchy music—featuring all the cast members: a younger Chum jumps in on guitar (Ngo magically transforming from a fanny-pack wearing “dad” to his younger self), with Leng (Tim Liu) on bass, Rom (Abraham Kim) on drums, Pou (Jane Lui) on keyboards and Sothea (Baehrens) singing, with a dulcet voice as beautiful and strong as her character. Colorful period costumes by Linda Cho, complete with platform shoes, create a nostalgic 1970s look.
It's an unexpected, vibrant and transporting use of music to move us back and forth between Neary’s present grappling with ghosts to Chum’s youthful past, unknown to Neary, when his band was everything. Convincing his family to stay in Phnom Penh for just one more week to play with them—rather than fleeing a growing uncertainty—proved costly beyond even his practical imagination.
Because by then, the peace-keeping American presence had abandoned the city, and the Khmer Rouge government immediately implemented force with tanks and guns to control its citizens, killing or imprisoning anyone deemed threatening to its communist ideology, namely intellectuals and artists—including musicians.
The foreboding atmosphere—created through video projection by Jason H. Thompson, lighting by Derek Jones, and gunfire and other sound effects by Megumi Katayama and Mikhail Fiksel— engulfs the young band, who had just completed recording their first album.
Chum soon finds himself in S-21, tied to a chair and horribly beaten with severe bruises (made vivid by Yoko Ka Haitz’s makeup design). At one point, when he sings for Duch a simple solo of Bob Dylan’s 1964 “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (“And you better start swimmin' / Or you'll sink like a stone”), its starkness reveals how thin the line is between Chum’s reality and what ours could be at any moment.
The rest—involving how bandmate Leng has become an S-21 prison guard, how Duch is able to sleep at night (ironically), and how in the present Neary runs away from Chum, and how he finds her—all culminate in a deeply moving and disturbing moment of revelation and possible reconciliation.
And of course, audience tension by then is so thick and heavy, what else could break it but a coda of lively music by Cyclos, with the audience invited to clap, dance and otherwise celebrate what director Yew calls the “resilience and enduring power of art and artists” in the face of brutality and destruction.
One wishes all theater could be like “Cambodian Rock Band,” telling stories we need now with the extraordinary energy of these six amazing performers—especially the talented Ngo, Baehrens and Tsuji in the leads, but all as an ensemble band—plus a creative crew. Its run has ended, but hopefully the spirit of this production can infuse our own art, in our own time of uncertainty.
“Cambodian Rock Band,” produced by East West Players in collaboration with Outside In Theatre, performed at the David Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, from Feb. 13 to March 23. A successful GoFundMe campaign has allowed the production to be recorded, including an audience, for future viewing. The video is currently in post-production.