Culture Junkie: On ‘Cambodian Rock Band,’ music and the power of art

Last Wednesday I was thinking about the power of art and music while watching an actor on a stage pretend to torture another actor. Both of them were playing former friends, both musicians before their country declared music to be illegal – two like-minded guys who were once members of the same rock ‘n roll band.

At one point, the guy being tortured started smiling.

“Why are you smiling?” he is asked.

He was smiling because he was genuinely grateful that if someone had to do terrible things to him, at least it was someone who knows his name, knows who and what was once meaningful to him – knows how much he has always loved music.

The play is “Cambodian Rock Band,” by Lauren Yee. It’s running for a few more weeks at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, directed by Chay Yew, with music written by Dengue Fever, an L.A.-based rock band that puts a psychedelic spin on ‘60s and ‘70s-era Cambodian rock and pop.

In the play, the actors take turns playing the music – guitars, drums, vocals, all of it – then stepping into various characters. Those instruments remain on stage through much of the story, until they suddenly don’t. Until they disappear like the hundreds of thousands of instruments that actually did disappear in Cambodia in 1975, along with the music-loving artists who played them. Along with millions of others – teachers, painters, writers, journalists, judges, lawyers and actors – under the thought-suppressing rule of the Khmer Rouge, after the Americans finally left and the revolutionaries took over and drowned the country in blood.

This was not the first time I’ve seen “Cambodian Rock Band.” That was in 2019 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It really got under my skin, gave me a lot to think about. It made me feel deeper sympathy, and maybe a bit of distant, privileged frustration, for those folks in Cambodia who waited just a bit too long to leave their country, frightened but skeptical that things could ever truly get as bad as certain people around them – mainly the teachers, the writers, the journalists, the judges, the actors and the musicians – desperately feared they could.

I had similar thoughts again last fall in New York when I saw Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” another story about people who waited a bit too long to escape – this time a large Jewish family in Austria in the 1930s – stubbornly confident in the foundational permanence of their own rights and freedoms in the country they loved.

Like I said, there was a lot to think about.

But what I remember most about that OSF production of “Cambodian Rock Band” was simply how gorgeously and impressively theatrical it was, how brutally human it was, how joyful it was. And I’ve been thinking of that show, off and on, ever since, and was happy to get a chance to see it again last week – and yes, I did just describe a play that reenacts torture during the reign of Khmer Rouge by using the word “joy.”

That’s the part that got under my skin.

Because “Cambodian Rock Band” is not really a play about torture and trauma and cruel dictatorships, though such things do make the occasional appearance.

“Cambodian Rock Band” is a play about joy.

It’s about how powerful we feel when we strum a guitar and a loud, awesome chord bursts from the speaker. It’s about the way the melody of a tune or the words of a song can so tightly coil themselves around our hearts that even when all hope is gone, we can access them and find a thimbleful of comfort or at least a short, fleeting moment of distraction from the hopelessness. It’s about the power of art and music and literature to sustain and heal and excite, to offer a promise of a better tomorrow, a better life, a better world.

Which of course is exactly why totalitarian governments try so hard to suppress artistic voices. From the mural-altering, science-silencing Church of Michelangelo’s time to the book-burning, art-controlling Nazis of the ‘30s and ‘40s to the state-controlled artist-and-poet executions of the Stalinists to the fear-mongering, table-banging, blacklisting McCarthyists of the 1950s, if a group or government wants to stop people from resisting its crackdowns and controls it must first declare war on those who would attempt to challenge such actions with their art.

Of the aforementioned U.S. black-listers, let’s recall the words of Republican senator George A. Dondero of Michigan, one of McCarthy’s more ardent supporters, who openly hated and sought to punish all practitioners of modern art: “Art which does not glorify our beautiful country in plain, simple terms that everyone can understand breeds dissatisfaction. It is therefore opposed to our government, and those who create and promote it are our enemies.” He loudly dismissed modern art as “depraved” and “destructive,” calling it “distorted and ugly.”

Among the worst offenders, according to Dondero, was Pablo Picasso.

Weird, sure. Distorted, sometimes. Ugly, occasionally – especially the works addressing the evils of fascism. But one look at Picasso’s “La Reve,” which some consider his most beautiful painting, or “The Old Guitarist,” breathtaking in its empathy and humanity, it’s hard to justify the eradication of his art as being “destructive.” But to hear Dondero talk about it, the only threat to America worse than an atomic exchange with Russia was chancing upon Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles D'Avignon” in a museum.

Throughout history, whenever such attacks on art are attempted or carried out, the works in question are described by their attackers in just such terms – calling them ugly, depressing, dark or deviant – as when Hitler’s Third Reich staged two side-by-side art shows in Munich in 1937. One was titled “The Great German Art Exhibition” and it was filled with paintings of smiling, heroic blonde people, blissfully happy to live in a country where nothing was ever depressing or unpleasant. The other exhibit, titled “Degenerate Art,” was primarily works created by those deemed to be enemies of the state, mainly Jews, Black artists, socialists, intellectuals – and anyone who thought that mass genocide was a human atrocity.

Today, many of those artists whose work was displayed in that exhibit – a number of whom had already relocated to the U.S. in the mid-1930s – are considered among the most influential of their time. While some of their work is complex and sometimes disturbing – since certain pieces were in direct response to the horrors they were witnessing – it’s hard to imagine the bulk of it as being the enemy of anything except those in the government who are truly, by definition, destructive, distorted, ugly and degenerate.

In fact, a lot of these artists’ work is quite beautiful.

You could even call some pieces “joyful.”

In “Cambodian Rock Band,” which I hope I get to see again before it ends its run, we are asked to try to understand how a species so committed to finding new ways to kill each other can be the same species to turn pain into music and poetry, to invent the electric guitar, to come up with surf rock and write songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

As humans, we’ve faced massively destructive forces, from earthquakes and firestorms and floods and hurricanes to wars and bombs and power-plant meltdowns. But I’m ready to say that there is no force on Earth more powerful than art.

It must be powerful. Otherwise so many evil men across human history would not have been, and continue to be, so afraid of it, and so eager to silence its voice. When we have art to hold onto, and poetry to recite and a song on our lips – even if it’s secretly tucked away in the back of our memory – we will always have the tools required to rebuild, we will have the hope we need to survive the most crushing of ordeals, to find our way back to someone who knows our name, someone who knows the things we love, someone who knows exactly who we are.

David Templeton’s “Culture Junkie” runs once a month or so in the Petaluma Argus-Courier. You can reach David at david.templeton@arguscourier.com.