Fractured narratives are featured in two recent Off-Broadway offerings depicting how families of severe trauma victims cope—or don’t—with their personal tragedies. Three generations of suicidal depression play out simultaneously in Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide, while Laureen Yee’s Cambodian Rock Band, at Signature Theater Company following multiple regional stagings, traces the Khmer Rouge’s brutal legacy on a former rock musician and his daughter. As in Suicide, the storyline of Yee’s piece twists and turns, sometimes even shatters, occasionally resulting in confusion but mainly inducing the unsettling, disturbing effects of psychological damage.
It’s not clear at first whose story is being told. The action opens with the titular musical ensemble singing a selection of hits from the indie group Dengue Fever who combined Cambodian rock and pop with Western music. Once the action proper starts, we find ourselves in Phnom Penh in 2008 where American-born lawyer Neary is working on bringing a major figure in the notorious Khmer Rogue to justice. Her father Chum, a Cambodian refugee, arrives unexpectedly and attempts to persuade her to drop the case and return with him to America. There’s also a mysterious narrator, who, like the Emcee in Cabaret, is charming and entertaining, but we soon learn he represents the evils of a corrupt government. Is the protagonist Neary, Chum, the narrator, or the band itself?
The pieces of the puzzle are eventually assembled when we flash back to 1975 and the younger Chum, the leader of the rock band which played at the beginning, is imprisoned and tortured in a concentration camp run by the narrator, Duch. When the Khmer overthrew the ruling Cambodian party, all Western music and ideas were banned, but when Duch finds out Chum is a rock musician, they develop an odd, symbiotic relationship.
Though Yee’s structure is fairly conventional, she does break the narrative wall by having Chum and Duch argue over whose story is being told. It turns out each of them is equally the main character as Yee develops the objectives and subtext of both prisoner and captor. Neary and Chum’s bandmates are not as well realized, but overall, this is a fascinating combination of political drama and rock concert with precise, varied direction by Chay Yew who perfectly balances the musical and theatrical elements.
Joe Ngo and Francis Jue deliver complex portraits of Chum and Duch, each peeling away stereotypical layers of victim and villain, finally emerging as men of ambiguous motives, manipulated by the powerful forces of their tragic country. The music is exciting and pulse-pounding, played with intensity by the cast members.
