Benjamin St. Pierre
Connector Staff
From Sept. 11 to Oct. 5, the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell was home to “Year Zero,” a play by Michael Golamco. Set in Long Beach, Calif. in 2003, the play chronicles a short time in the lives of four Asian youths, whose personalities are each a little different and contribute an individual aspect to the narrative and its theme. Two of the characters, Cambodian brother and sister Vuthy and Ra, are played by Daniel Velasco and Juliette Hing-Lee. A family friend of theirs (in the play) and a fellow Cambodian is Han, played by Michael Rosete, and Glenn, who is Chinese, is played by Arthur Keng. Each character faces a different situation coupled with differing pasts, but they’re all similar in the fact that their futures and prospects remain uncertain.
I mandatorily went to see the play as part of the curriculum of the Honors College, and I cannot say that I was previously a fan of theater before seeing “Year Zero.” I honestly didn’t know what to expect going into this, though the title was revealing enough of the premise.
The namesake of the play “Year Zero” was an idea birthed from the crooked mind of former Cambodian dictator and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his followers. Essentially, Pot longed for Cambodia to abandon modernization, intellectualism and freedom in favor of a communist, forced-agrarian lifestyle that “honored” the ways of life of the poor, working class. But what did this create? The mass slaughter of around 2 million innocents who died because of a failure to blindly follow completely idiotic and harmful dogma. Any hint of disobedience would send anyone to the killing fields; the institution of the family was broken to make siblings and offspring turn each other in to the Rouge. Cambodians had to survive in hell or try to flee.
In the play, Vuthy and Ra’s mother recently died, and Ra takes on the role of both mother and sister to Vuthy. Ra, a college student nearing graduation, and Vuthy, a high schooler, often have their verbal disagreements, sometimes even escalating to physical violence, as a result of their desperation to survive in Long Beach, a city of immigrants in and of itself. To avoid plot summary and offer only a brief synopsis, Han, a career convict recently let out of jail, becomes the sole male influence in Vuthy’s life and takes him under his wing, trying to keep him away from the trouble and crime he continues to face.
Glenn, a preppy college student, tries to maintain a romantic relationship with Ra, but there is no real love within it; he cannot provide understanding and true love to her. Vuthy tries to understand what it means to be a young Cambodian man with no father; essentially, he has to decide between crime and a career. And Ra dwells on the past, and the stories her mother never told her and how exactly she will be able to handle everything going on in her life, and in her future.
Like I said, going into the play, I really had no expectations, but it turned out to be captivating and ruthlessly entertaining the whole time. There was sadness, historical references, frequent comic relief, and overall, an atmosphere to it that all of us could relate to, despite our pasts or ancestries. There was a universality to it; a struggle we all see and even experience every day, in our own lives. “Year Zero” represented a time anew for the characters involved, and I believe I speak on behalf of mostly everyone who saw it when I say I give this play a 10/10. I never got bored of it, never got distracted and the themes presented weren’t so bad, either.
