A young, aspiring actor joins an itinerant theatre troupe to perform on makeshift stages in remote villages, traveling from place to place by truck, or in the absence of paved roads, by bullock cart. Readers will recall scenes from The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha by Satrajit Ray, or Shakespearewallah, by James Ivory. There is…
When psychedelic rock music came to Southeast Asia via American GIs during the Vietnam War, it greatly influenced the music scene in Cambodia. Cambodian Rock Band, a new play running in Chicago through May 12 celebrates this resulting music that not only abruptly went away in 1975, but for the most part hasn’t been performed…
Ling Hon Lam encourages us to think of emotions in terms of space; when we sympathize with a character in a play or feel something for another person, that emotion takes place, for it moves us outside ourselves. In Chinese this relation between space and emotion is described by the term qingjing; a scenery of…