“The hottest play in America” comes to Pittsburgh when “Cambodian Rock Band” opens City Theatre’s 45th season this week.

The success of the play, plus the $275,000 Doris Duke Artists prize for contribution to theater and other prestigious rewards, have given Lauren Yee the kind of year playwrights dream of. The three-city production that begins previews here Saturday is one of two productions currently making their way across the country.

The play with music — a mini-concert, really — was commissioned by South Coast Repertory when Marc Masterson was artistic director, and has followed him to City Theatre, where he currently holds that title. It not only opens a landmark year but it also begins the first season since his return to the South Side company.

Inspired by a rock sound that is both contemporary and a blast from an almost forgotten past, “Cambodian Rock Band” recalls a time when Cambodia was creating its own rock traditions, before music was stamped out by the brutal Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

Sharon Eberson

Review: 'Cambodian Rock Band' electrifies with humor, history and rock 'n' roll

A nationwide Theater Communications Group survey chose “Cambodian Rock Band” as No. 1. “It's a hot property," Masterson said. 

At the beginning of the process, he was most taken by the father-daughter story that drives the narrative.

“Lauren had an idea about a daughter going back to discover her heritage and a father who wasn't really ready for that, so it was the melding [with the music of Cambodia] that came together to form the play,” Masterson said.

Yee, a San Francisco native who now lives in New York City, traces the origins of her play to 2011, when she was visiting Cambodia as part of a larger Southeast Asia trip.

“I visited the capital, Phnom Penh. The big sights, if you’re going as an uninitiated tourist, is Angkor Wat, the historic, sprawling complex of temples, and  the other is the far more recent Khmer Rouge genocide sites, which includes the prison S21.”

The former suburban high school “was very eerie just as a space,” she recalled. She pictured the classrooms as layered with “the physical memories of what happened there at S21 — prisoners who were tortured, processed and eventually shipped out to the killing fields. And it was really overwhelming.”

The same year, Yee went with a friend to a concert by the band Dengue Fever, whose surf-rock sound — “so completely new and so incredibly familiar” — grabbed her and wouldn’t let go.

That night took her “down the rabbit hole” of learning about the band and its music. She found it was rooted in “Cambodia oldies” by artists who disappeared when the Khmer Rouge came to power.

Learning that musicians were among the 2 million people murdered in Cambodia, she at first struggled with how to put it into words.

“I wanted to find a way into it that sufficiently celebrated who these musicians were and how incredible this music scene was,” she said. “In so many instances, when you hear stories about genocide or any kind of atrocity, your mind goes educational. All the pictures in your mind suddenly go black and white, sepia-toned, very sad. And I didn’t want to tell a story about victims. I wanted to tell a story about survivors.”

When she received the commission by South Coast Rep in 2015, these ideas had stayed with her, “but I never knew how to tackle them.”

When she began her research, “the universe kind of opened up and said, ‘This is what your play is going to be about.’”

South Coast’s CrossRoads program was a play commissioning project instituted by Masterson to generate works that reflected the diversity of Orange County. Masterson and City’s staff recently proposed a Building Bridges project in a RAD ImPAct Grant presentation that would support projects related to immigrants on the South Side.

Masterson related a rare moment during a packed reading at a California festival. At the end, “the audience leapt to their feet, screaming. They wouldn't stop. The band was playing, but it was so clear what the theatrical energy and emotional core of it was and how the personal and political and cultural come together in such a powerful way.”

Yee, of Chinese descent, began spending time in Orange County. She met the members of Dengue Fever and attended an all-day contemporary Cambodian music festival … “I began to make the connections with the Khmer — the Cambodian community in Long Beach — and it’s a huge population.”

Diep Tran, writing about Yee’s play “The Great Leap” in American Theatre Magazine, said the playwright’s world view reflects a sense of humor and enthusiastic optimism even in the face of what the worst the world has to offer. “The Great Leap” tells the story of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests as seen by a visiting American basketball team. 

“Though Yee’s plays often have a dark undertone, you can’t always tell at first because of their shiny, happy packaging,” Tran wrote.

“Cambodian Rock Band” explores what became of musicians during the time of the Khmer Rouge. It also follows a young woman helping to prosecute Comrade Duch, a character in the play and the infamous real-life head of S21 prison who oversaw the deaths of thousands of his countrymen.

Initially, “Cambodian Rock Band” was going to be a play about music, perhaps with a few audio tracks, and not the live band mini-concert it evolved into, with actor-musicians playing the music and telling the story.

But as casting began, actor Joe Ngo explained that his parents had survived the Cambodian labor camps and, oh, by the way, he plays electric guitar. When the play was workshoped at Berkeley Rep, “I accidentally cast four actors who play instruments,” Yee said.

“In a way, the very deep talent pool dictated how this play came to be constructed the way that it is. It was almost so easy to do, why wouldn’t you?”

There are two casts now, on different tracks. City’s is a co-production of Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass. The production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that features Ngo is on its way to New York’s off-Broadway Signature Theatre.

“I find it so wonderful,” Yee says with the street sounds of New York City and a baby in the background.

The awards and monetary prizes that came with them had perfect timing for the playwright and new mom.

“One thing that’s been kind of crazy is, just as this has taken off, I gave birth in December. So my daughter is 9 months old now.… My career has been thriving in ways I never could have imagined even a year ago.”

Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960. Twitter: @SEberson_pg. Sign up for the PG performing arts newsletter Behind the Curtain at Newsletter Preferences.

First Published: September 10, 2019, 7:02 p.m.