Cambodian Rock Band Tickets

Using vibrant 1970’s hits to propel an original story, Cambodian Rock Band follows a father, Chum, and his daughter, Neary, in 2008 as they travel to the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh. There, the daughter aims to persecute a notorious war criminal while her father revisits the city for the first time in decades after escaping the country’s then-Communist regime. Flashbacks offer a window into Cambodia’s painful past, which are always exuberantly staged thanks to the live rock band and Lauren Yee’s winning humor and grit.

Lauren Yee’s play first premiered at South Coast Repertory in California in 2018 and has since gripped audiences across the country. With its razor-sharp look at a singular father-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of Cambodian rock music, Cambodian Rock Band explores one nation’s Communist past and how it altered art and community in the decades since.

A celebration of Southeast Asian identity told as a universal family story, Cambodian Rock Band is a rollicking play that pays homage to an entire generation of musicians who were silenced and purged by the Khmer Rouge. Along the way, long-buried family secrets will finally be unearthed as the famed rock score explodes alongside one country’s dynamic history.

What to Watch For

• Lauren Yee is an accomplished playwright and has won some of the theatre industry’s top prizes: she won the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play for Cambodian Rock Band and also has a Whiting Award for Drama, Doris Duke Performing Artist Award and was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.
• The Los Angeles Times, in its rave review of the world premiere, said, “Joy, heartbreak and psychedelic surf rock power a fierce, funny Cambodian Rock Band … Yee is such a confident dramatist.”
• In an interview in American Theatre magazine, Lauren Yee shared, “I think it is particularly noteworthy that Cambodian music is not just covers of American or Western music. It’s really this modern, distinctive sound that is found nowhere else. It is kind of all these influences, from traditional Cambodian music, French New Wave, some of the Vietnam War-era radio. It is so ingrained in the culture in a way that I just find incredibly unique.”