Cambodia’s troubled past inspired O.C. playwright

By PAUL HODGINS

Cambodia is a land filled with untold stories.


They're everywhere: in the beautiful relics of an ancient religion at the temples of Angkor Wat, in the unspeakable tragedies of the country's more recent past under the Pol Pot regime.

"It's a place that leaves a deep impression. It inspired me in ways I didn't expect," said Irvine-born playwright David Wiener, whose new play, "Extraordinary Chambers," was prompted by a visit to Cambodia. It debuts June 1 at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.

Wiener traveled to Cambodia in 2008 with his sister, wife and parents. "It was a trip to Thailand and then everyone went on this short side trip to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat."

The family's guide on the Cambodian trek was a man named Sopoan. "He was very knowledgeable and really good at describing the history and art of the place," Wiener recalled. "During the course of our tour he and I developed a deeper dialogue."

Sopoan revealed his past to Wiener.
"During the Khmer Rouge era he had been a high school physics teacher -- a dangerous occupation then. Intellectuals and educated people were the enemy. I had this humbling and unsettling feeling that I was ... just encountering the veneer of a place and beneath it was all of the complex history and deep loss. And this man put it into a human, empathetic frame."

Sopoan's story hinted at a time and place that tried people in unimaginable ways. That revelation galvanized the playwright.

"I came back to New York and dropped the play I was working on and immediately started reading a lot about Cambodia. I wasn't even aware that there was this huge international effort to reconcile the genocide that happened there in the 1970s and lay the blame at the feet of these old men and women who were still alive."

Wiener also discovered that the Pol Pot era of forced agrarian socialist reform (1976-79) is still a delicate subject in Cambodia.

"To this day the regime of Pol Pot and the subsequent civil war still isn't taught in Cambodian schools. You're talking about a country that eliminated 20 percent of its population -- an entire generation, really." (By some estimates, 2.5 million Cambodians died as a result of the unrest.) "Anyone you meet there is not that many degrees removed from the violence that happened. There are perpetrators living with victims."

CONFLICTING NEEDS IN COLLISION

Wiener, a 1991 graduate of Irvine's University High School, has won several major awards and received commissions from Atlantic Theater Company, South Coast Repertory, SoHo Rep and A Contemporary Theater. His Hollywood drama, "System Wonderland," was produced at SCR in 2007.

"Extraordinary Chambers" is a departure for him in several respects, the playwright said. This is the first time he has delved deeply into another culture and created characters based on notorious real-life sources.

"Extraordinary Chambers" pits American and Cambodian values against each other in a story that involves an American telecommunications executive, his troubled wife, and a mysterious Cambodian official named Dr. Heng. He and his wife, Rom Chang, live in a dilapidated villa. Heng has a taste for expensive French wine and oozes old world charm; Rom is suspicious and withdrawn.

Gradually, secrets are revealed as characters learn more about each other and conflicting needs collide.

The American couple, Carter and Mara, desperately wants to be parents -- a plot element that paralleled Wiener's life at the time (he's now the father of a 16-month old child).

"My wife and I were struggling to have children and I think that need was present in my own life. And the isolating aspect of what it's like for a couple to go through fertility treatments and then adoption in a foreign land, I really wanted to make that an element in the play."

CAMBODIA'S NOT ALL THAT DIFFERENT

Wiener said Heng and his wife closely resemble figures from the Khmer Rouge regime. What interested him wasn't their culpability but the moral circumstances that they were forced to face.

"It's easy to look at people who are instrumental in acts of horrible violence and dismiss or condemn them. But their internal rationale is very fascinating -- the reasons they say why they did what they did."

Wiener came away form his research convinced that there is less separating us from war-torn Cambodia than we think.

"Really, the only thing different between us and them is the circumstances. It's hard for us to imagine what we are capable of to ensure our own survival."

Wiener said that writing "Extraordinary Chambers" pushed his skills and sensitivities to the limit.

"It's a tough situation as a writer and a challenging one. This particular history doesn't belong to me.

"But the play is about what it's like to engage in the history that doesn't belong to you. I tried to be sensitive and careful and accurate, and as empathetic as possible. So much of what drove me to write the play was how little I understood, and how badly I wanted to understand."