Skip to main content

Lauren Yee, Drama

Lauren Yee. Photo: Joey Yee.

Lauren Yee is a playwright born and raised in San Francisco. She lives in New York City. She received her B.A. from Yale University and her M.F.A. in playwriting from University of California, San Diego. Lauren’s work includes King of the Yees, The Great Leap, Cambodian Rock Band, Ching Chong Chinaman, The Hatmaker’s Wife, and others. She has been a Dramatists Guild Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a MAP Fund grantee. She is the winner of the Kesselring Prize and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, and others. The Hatmaker’s Wife was an Outer Critics Circle nominee for the John Gassner Award for best play by a new American playwright. Lauren is a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, a 2018/2019 Hodder fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, and a New Dramatists playwright.

*

An excerpt from Cambodian Rock Band:

CHUM

THAT’S why i’m here? you’re going to kill me over that? what i wrote down on a piece of paper?!

DUCH

i’m going to get someone to do it for me, but yes.

CHUM

you don’t even know what that is.

DUCH

CIA code, obviously.

CHUM

but if brother number one wants to know what it means? what will you tell him? how will you explain it?

DUCH

it’s a message. to your operatives, that’s what it is.

CHUM

but what if you’re wrong?

DUCH

what what what?

CHUM

(deliberate) what if you’re wrong.

DUCH

luckily, that is never the case.

CHUM

except this time you are. you kill me now, you will never know the answer. and then what will brother number one think of your excellent investigative work, comrade duch?

(DUCH gestures for LENG to go.)

DUCH

you may go.

(LENG doesn’t.)

DUCH

comrade, you may go.

(LENG stand there.)

DUCH

you and i will have the opportunity to discuss your overzealous extracurricular activities at a later date.

(LENG exists, shuts the door.)

DUCH

well?

CHUM

they’re lyrics. to a song.

(DUCH looks down at the piece of paper.)

DUCH

it doesn’t even rhyme.

CHUM

it does in english.

DUCH

and where did you get it from?

CHUM

i wrote it down from memory.

DUCH

because you’re a spy.

CHUM

because i’m a musician. my band and i used to play this song all the time. it’s a very popular song.

DUCH

then why don’t i know it?

CHUM

you will, once i play it.

DUCH

let’s hear it. this “song,” these “lyrics.”

CHUM

i need an instrument first.

DUCH

you’re stalling.

CHUM

find me an instrument and we’ll do it later.

DUCH

you mean tomorrow.

CHUM

i just want you to hear how it’s supposed to be played. so you know the absolute truth.

(DUCH goes to the box of torture instruments, pulls out an electric guitar. he hands it to him.)

CHUM

this is a stratocaster.

DUCH

yes.

CHUM

where did you get this from?

DUCH

i have a way of making things appear and disappear.

(DUCH plus the electric guitar into the wall. CHUM plays a note.)

CHUM

i usually play bass.

DUCH

if you can play bass, you can play guitar.

CHUM

how do you know that?

DUCH

i tend to know everything. now impress me.

CHUM

i i i i

DUCH

yes?

CHUM

i don’t know if i remember how it goes.

DUCH

up to you.

(CHUM closes his eyes, listens to something inside of him. he plays. SONG: “TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’ ”)

DUCH

okay. fine. it wasn’t electric.
but hey, you know what? maybe it was!
maybe i did plug it in.
maybe dylan really did go electric in cambodia.
you don’t know.
this is my story, i could tell you anything i want.

isn’t that strange?
while you are here
in this space
i can tell you anything and you will believe it.
because whoever tells the story tells the truth.

because if a tree falls in a forest and that forest is a communist dictatorship and the dictator
has ordered you to cut down all the trees to make way for the forest you’re supposed to be
planting, then who’s to say what did or didn’t happen!
but what if for certain:
that night
for the first time in days weeks years, i am asleep.

(DUCH drifts off to sleep.)

DUCH

and i am transported to a place where i am just an innocent bystander.

(CHUM finishes his song.)

DUCH

and the next morning, i kill him.

(CHUM looks at DUCH, waits.)

DUCH

i try to.
i should.
i mean, the capitalist.
the westerner.
the master of sleep.
but i forget.
yes, that’s it.
i plan to kill him, but you know what?
every night, i forget.
about pol pot.
about central committee.
about every single thing breathing down my neck.
so every night
one more night.

CHUM

what do you want to hear tomorrow?

DUCH

and i write down on the back of his photo: “keep for use.”

CHUM

“keep for use.”

DUCH

“for now.”

CHUM

“for now.”

(CHUM back on his guitar as DUCH listens. DUCH looks at the piece of paper.)

DUCH

what does it mean?

CHUM

they’re lyrics

DUCH

but the message of it.

CHUM

i never really thought about it.

DUCH

you sang it all the time.

CHUM

i never chose the songs we played.

DUCH

you were a member of the band.

CHUM

i was just the bassist. it wasn’t my place to decide.

DUCH

you were just following orders.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2FrvRFY

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more