Creator
Lauren Yee
American playwright whose play Cambodian Rock Band, with songs by Dengue Fever and others, follows a Cambodian American family back to the Khmer Rouge years.
Lauren Yee is an American playwright and television writer from San Francisco who wrote the play Cambodian Rock Band, with music by Dengue Fever and others.[1][2]
The play about Cambodian rock
Yee first heard Dengue Fever while she was a student in the playwriting master's program at the University of California, San Diego, when friends took her to see the band at a street festival. For a long time afterward, she told a San Diego television station, she was fascinated by the band's music and by Cambodian rock.[3] In 2015 South Coast Repertory commissioned a play from her and asked her to look for ideas around Orange County. She came across Dengue Fever again at a show in Long Beach and kept meeting Cambodian culture along the way, and the play grew from there.[3]
The play follows a young Cambodian American woman who is working to bring a Khmer Rouge war criminal to justice. Her father fled Cambodia thirty years before and now goes back for the first time.[2][4] Songs are played live through the evening by a band on stage, mixing Dengue Fever's songs with older Cambodian hits.[2][5] Yee has called it a story of survivors and of how music endures.[3]
Chay Yew directed the world premiere at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, in March 2018. Joe Ngo, Brooke Ishibashi, Abraham Kim, Raymond Lee, Jane Lui and Daisuke Tsuji were in the cast.[4][5] Later productions included the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, La Jolla Playhouse, Victory Gardens, City Theatre, Merrimack Rep and Signature Theatre in New York.[1]
In 2021 Yee and Senon Williams of Dengue Fever gave a talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on the play's music and its place in Cambodian American stories of identity and family history.[2] The play won the Horton Foote Prize and the American Theatre Critics Association's Steinberg Award.[1][6]
Other work
Yee's other plays include The Great Leap and King of the Yees. She has written for the television series Pachinko and Soundtrack, and she is an executive producer of a television adaptation of Anthony Veasna So's Afterparties.[1] She lives in New York City.[1][2]
See also
- Cambodian Rock Band (recorded performance)
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Signature Theatre, Lauren Yee (undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 UC Santa Barbara Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, Lauren Yee and Senon Williams: The Music of Cambodian Rock Band (undated)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 NBC 7 San Diego, Award-winning playwright, UCSD alum brings 'Cambodian Rock Band' to Playhouse (undated)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Cultural Attaché, Cambodian Rock Band (March 5, 2018)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 BroadwayWorld, Review: Powerful new play Cambodian Rock Band makes world premiere at South Coast Repertory (March 19, 2018)
- ↑ Wikipedia, Lauren Yee (undated)