Year Zero
For many families, sacrifice is an all-too common experience. Parents work long hours at multiple jobs to support their children. As children grow older, they often give up their personal time and freedoms to care for younger siblings or take on after-school jobs to help ends meet. And as we progress into our later years, we can only hope we will have loved ones at our side who make the time to care for us.
Michael Golamco’s Year Zero is a play about those sacrifices, told specifically from the perspective of a Cambodian American family as part of Victory Gardens Theater’s Ignition Festival, which spotlights the work of young playwrights of color. The work is directed by Andrea J. Dymond.
As we meet the Vichea family at the play’s start, their matriarch, who arrived in the States years before to escape the brutal violence in her home country, has recently passed away. Her children, 16-year-old Vuthy (played by Joyee Lin) and his older sister Ra (Jennifer Shin) are left to pack up their childhood home in Long Beach as they attempt to move on from their personal loss.
The siblings have very different ways of dealing with their situation. Vuthy, at the height of male teenage angst, spends much of his time sticking to himself, playing Dungeons and Dragons and talking to a human skull he keeps in a cookie jar when not busy getting into scuffles with other boys at his school. He struggles to find friends and feels torn in his personal identity - not Cambodian enough for Cambodian friends, not white enough for white friends.
Ra, back from school in San Francisco and dealing with a souring relationship with a boyfriend, is left to look over her brother, question the future while packing up the past. In looking backward, she realizes, through conversations with longtime neighborhood friend Han (Tim Chiou), that she barely knew her mother. The information she learns of her mother’s struggles cause her to question her every decision and whether her own path is rendering her mother’s sacrifices as "worth it."
The ideas of worth and identity prove central to this work, which is heartfelt in its words but unfortunately light in performance. As the actors deal with the uncertainties that lie before their characters, they remain surprisingly static with regard to their shaken circumstances. The bizarre stoicism drags on throughout the work until fizzling by its end, as its most interesting character, Han, literally fades into the shadows without much explanation.
Despite disappointing performances from its cast, Year Zero remains noteworthy for its exploration into the experiences of Cambodian Americans attempting to conflate their identities and recover from their home’s history of violence. It’s simply too bad that the result of the conflicting emotions and personal struggles felt undeveloped in this introverted production.
"Year Zero" runs through October 18 at the Victory Gardens Studio Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, with shows Tuesday-Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 4 and 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:30 p.m. For ticket information, visit www.victorygardens.org or call 773-871-3000.
