In Sam Chanse’s affecting play, a daughter tries to understand her mother, who resists any reminder of her escape from the Khmer Rouge.
Trying to understand our parents’ past lives can feel like fumbling through the dark, especially for the children of immigrants. Recollections are selective, and many people have lived through things they’d rather forget. The challenge — and heartbreak — of bridging that chasm is the subject of “What You Are Now,” an affecting study of memory and migration by the playwright Sam Chanse that opened on Thursday night at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan.
Pia (Pisay Pao) knows hardly anything about her mother’s experience fleeing Cambodia in 1975, amid the country’s deadly takeover by the Khmer Rouge. But the pain of her mother’s experience has shaped Pia’s life, like an imprint, she says, seared into her cells. It’s why Pia is pursuing neurological research, looking for a scientific solution to her mother’s mental suffering.
Pia’s mother (Sonnie Brown) carries herself like a ghost, looking lost behind the eyes and staunchly resisting any reminders of Cambodia. She’s also held herself at arm’s length from Pia and her brother Darany (Robert Lee Leng), whom she raised on her own in small-town Massachusetts. (The height of their mother’s physical affection is a stiff-elbowed pat on the shoulder.) If Pia can’t enter or soothe her mother’s mind, she channels that desire into studying the brain.
Chanse’s play shifts back and forth over a 10-year span in Pia’s study of memory and its potential for manipulation. When she speaks to her mom on the phone from the lab, their conversations are limited to the mundane, like what’s for dinner and how Pia’s career is advancing. But when Darany’s ex-girlfriend (Emma Kikue) comes around gathering testimony for a nonprofit from survivors of the Khmer Rouge, Pia’s mother refuses to open up about the past.
“What You Are Now” isn’t propelled by incidents or dramatic action, but ideas about how the mind works and the gradual revelation of personal histories. Pia dates and breaks up with a co-worker (Curran Connor) with whom she cleans rat cages. Darany and his girlfriend, who is half white, smoke pot and swap stories of how they relate to their shared Cambodian heritage. Pia’s mom loses her temper when she walks in on her kids dancing to Cambodian rock.
As Pia, Pao is spiky and guarded, observing and responding to her mother’s behavior with the cool remove that a scientist might keep for her subject. As her chill (and way cooler) older brother, Leng makes for a loose and grounded contrast, all street-slang and curious heart. And Brown is quietly arresting as a woman both fragile and imperious, slouched like a comma but with a will of steel.
Directed by the Civilians artistic director, Steve Cosson, the smartly minimal production unfolds against a cool-gray monochrome interior, like a slate wiped clean. Frames that might display family portraits hang empty, and what could be a wall clock has no markings of time (the set design is by Riw Rakkulchon). Characters appear isolated in the dark, as they connect at a distance on the phone or retreat into their own perspectives (the lighting design is by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew).
Pia explores whether it’s possible to alter what we remember, and memory’s relationship to identity, by delving into empirical study rather than excavating and sorting through emotions. The play includes perhaps one too many descriptions of real-life experiments, which are limited in dramatic potential.
But “What You Are Now” excels in unforced revelations about the human struggle to connect, and to share the messy and sometimes painful stories that make us who we are. Everything we hear and experience, and how we remember it, reshapes our brains, Pia says. It’s a scientific testament to the power of storytelling to change minds.
What You Are Now
Through April 3 at the Ensemble Studio Theater, Manhattan; ensemblestudiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
