Living in Los Angeles with great theatre available to us not just here, but also by going a bit north or south, means we can sometimes get a more complete idea of a particular artist’s work. Currently one can see two different plays by Lauren Yee. The Great Leap is playing at The Pasadena Playhouse and Cambodian Rock Band (which played at South Coast Rep) has its San Diego area premiere with a new production at the La Jolla Playhouse where it will run through December 15th.
We’ve covered this play before, so it begs the question what prompts us to offer up details about this production, too. Simply put, Lauren Yee is a graduate of UC San Diego and this marks a homecoming for her in addition to a local premiere.
In Yee’s play a young woman tries to wrap her head around her family and its history three decades after her father left Cambodia. The way into this story is through the rock ‘n’ roll music of Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s.
The play features music by Los Angeles band Dengue Fever who celebrate precisely the kind of music depicted in Cambodian Rock Band. They wrote the songs for the play.
Yee has received great reviews for this play across the country and it is one of the most produced plays regionally this year.
The cast in this production includes Brooke Ishibashi, Abraham Kim, Jane Lui, Joe Ngo, James Ryen, Daisuke Tsuji and Moses Villaram. Chay Yew directs.
For tickets go here.
Photo from Cambodian Rock Band by Jim Carmody/Courtesy of the La Jolla Playhouse
