With her play “Cambodian Rock Band,” receiving its Chicago premiere at Victory Gardens, Lauren Yee has pulled off a piece of writing so deft as to successfully contain a mashup of genre and tone that barely seems possible.
Crazily clever and compelling, this play is a joyful work about a genocidal history, a gentle dramedy about a father-daughter relationship, an increasingly intense thriller about a friendship put into the most unfriendly of circumstances, a tragi-comedy about a country where music was in its soul until it was banned, and a tale of pursuing justice when survival and innocence are contradictions.
