Eliana Willis

At first it seems as if “The Headlands,” the beguiling new play by Christopher Chen that opened on Monday at the Claire Tow Theater, is going to fall into the trap that many staged detective stories do. Instead of enacting live conflicts, they narrate crimes that occurred in the past. If I wanted that kind of experience, I’d plug in my earbuds and listen to “Serial.”But “The Headlands,” a mystery set in the Bay Area with a vigorous nod to “Vertigo,” is merely feinting in that direction. Chen’s main character is a 30-something Google engineer named Henry (Aaron Yoo), whose sideline of solving cold cases is initially presented as just another aspect of his nerd personality.“Tonight I’m going to tell you about one particular case I studied,” he begins, as if he were hosting a podcast.That case is the murder, 20 years before the action, of George Wong, the co-owner of a kitchen contracting business in the Sunset District. No one was ever charged, no motive adduced, and Wong’s wife, Leena, who discovered the body and might have known more, is now dead of cancer. Still, Henry comes to suspect from piecemeal clues that the killing was more than the random burglary gone bad that police had declared it to be.Henry’s connection to the story also turns out to be more than random: He’s George Wong’s son. (I won’t spoil any more of the plot, which in any case includes a school of red herrings.) The clues he uncovers come not only from fresh evidence — he interviews George’s business partner (Henry Stram), Leena’s best friend (Mia Katigbak) and the detective who originally investigated the case (Stram again) — but also from his half-buried memories, garbled and enigmatic though they may be.It’s in those memories that the play’s deeper drama starts to awaken. Re-enactments of his parents’ early years, as recalled by the elderly Leena (Katigbak again), uncover conflicts of which Henry was barely aware. Some arose from the couple’s contrasting social status: George, a new immigrant working as a dishwasher in Chinatown; Leena, a second-generation princess in Pacific Heights. It was far from both neighborhoods, across the Golden Gate in the Marin Headlands, that they met and courted over braised pork and sour cabbage.Other memories are Henry’s own, from the period immediately preceding the murder — if it even was a murder. In them, the 40-ish George (Johnny Wu) and Leena (Laura Kai Chen) argue about things their curious young son could not comprehend. Why was his father so morose? Why was his mother so hurt?We see these anxious scenes repeated several times, nearly verbatim, but each repetition is recolored, like a melody underscored with different harmonies, by the new information Henry has turned up in the meantime. Even the meaning of an individual word, such as “despair,” changes as the mystery unfolds. Memory is not just unreliable, Chen demonstrates, but also highly contextual. The known facts of the past are only a small part of the picture.The picture itself is key to this LCT3 production, sleekly directed by Knud Adams on a set, by Kimie Nishikawa, that consists mostly of blank walls suitable for projections. Those projections, by Ruey Horng Sun, support not only the play’s noir sensibilities with lots of lamplit San Francisco streets but also its view of the fragmentary nature of consciousness. Images flicker, regroup, disappear, return. What seems like documentary evidence may be merely a trick of light in air.If “The Headlands” achieves greater depth than its mere procedural aspects at first suggest, it’s because of that double vision. In the outer story of Henry’s inquiry, Chen’s focus widens from the unreliability of historical memory to the unreliability of even contemporary perception. Exhibit A is Henry’s girlfriend, Jess (Mahira Kakkar), whom he introduces as an ideal helpmeet, eagerly participating in his investigation.“Some of our favorite memories as a couple involve hunching over crime photographs, brainstorming ways a man’s head could have been bludgeoned in,” he says in what passes for sweet talk.But he may not be reading Jess’s signals correctly, and when we — too briefly — get a glimpse of their relationship from her perspective instead of his, the complacency of the genre cracks open. It does so again, at greater length, with the arrival of a character I cannot tell you about. Suffice it to say that in a wonderful reorientation of perception, we are forced to review the entire story, literally, but this time from a previously unimaginable point of view.I wish these re-orientations, the most exciting part of the play, took up more of its 80-minute running time, and that the nod to noir style were sharper. (The dialogue occasionally slumps into woodenness.) Like most detective stories, “The Headlands” depends too much on the mere withholding and manipulation of information, but since that is Chen’s theme, you tend to excuse it. Even if not, the engaging cast — especially Yoo, Chen and Katigbak in the better-written roles — makes up for any authorial glibness with completely grounded performances.That groundedness is key in a play that, like Chen’s best-known earlier work, “Caught,” wants to live simultaneously on many levels. “Caught” was set in the art world; “The Headlands,” as the pun in its title suggests, in the even-narrower confines of the human imagination. The least solvable mysteries, it seems to suggest, are the ones we carry inside us.The HeadlandsTickets Through March 22 at the Claire Tow Theater, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, lct.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

Clap your hands, everybody, and sing along with Pol! That’s as in Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, which wiped out nearly a quarter of that country’s population during the second half of the 1970s.All right, to be exact, it’s not Pol himself who’s shaking a tambourine and urging the audience to get up and dance at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where Lauren Yee’s adventurous, tonally scrambled “Cambodian Rock Band” opened on Monday night. Instead, this enthusiastic master of ceremonies is called Duch. That is the nom de guerre of the former math teacher Kang Kek Iew, a Pol confederate known as “Cambodia’s Himmler,” who ran the notorious S21 prison (read: death) camp.The real Duch, who was the first of the Khmer Rouge leaders to be tried for mass murder, is now serving out a life prison sentence. But Yee, a playwright of great heart and audacity to match, has seen fit to give her version of Duch the run of her brash but conventionally sentimental play, which features the songs of the Los Angeles-based Cambodian surf rock group Dengue Fever.Duch is bravely portrayed by Francis Jue with a flaming archness that neither he nor Chay Yew’s production can quite pull off. Think of him as a combination of the creepy Weimar-era M.C. from “Cabaret” and the antic Hitler from the recent Oscar nominee “Jojo Rabbit,” and you’ll understand that Jue’s assignment is not an easy one.“Genocide, genocide, genocide — boo!” Duch says, taunting us with a full dose of snark, in his opening monologue. He proceeds to ask us, with justification, “Are you confused? Welcome to Cambodia, 2008!”That’s the year in which Duch’s trial begins. And in Yee’s fictionalized evocation of that time, Neary (an earnest Courtney Reed) — a young American NGO worker of Cambodian descent — has stumbled upon crucial evidence. It was thought that only seven people had survived their time in S21. But Neary has unearthed a photograph the suggests there may have been an eighth.And who might he or she be? Oh, dear. This is where the Code of the Spoilers dictates that I become evasive. But it’s pretty much impossible to discuss this play without disclosing its essential plot twist, which, after all, is revealed fairly early.The eighth survivor is a man who, hearing of Neary’s involvement in the case, has come to visit her in Phnom Penh. His name is Chum (Joe Ngo), and he is Neary’s father.Cloaked in a camouflage of hard-smiling passive aggression, Chum has always been reticent with his family on the subject of his life before coming to America. However, the demands of international justice and an insistent daughter force him into memoir mode, which means propelling the play into a sustained flashback, set in the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.I’m making “Cambodian Rock Band” sound more straightforward than it is. It is structured, a bit haphazardly, as a nest of frames within frames.It is as if Yee, whose earlier works include the similarly ambitious time-traveling play “The Great Leap” (set partly in China), feels that a subject as monstrous as the Khmer Rouge cannot be approached head-on. So she tugs us, by degrees, into the horror at her play’s center with bait-and-switch tactics, which include sitcom coziness, cheerfully packaged shock effects (including dark commentary by Duch) and good old rock ’n’ roll, Cambodian-style.Takeshi Kata’s mutable set is dominated by a bandstand, and the show begins with a performance by the Cyclos, the fictional group of the title who here perform the Dengue Fever’s music. The songs — a bright, raucous confluence of varied international pop strains — are agreeably performed by Abraham Kim, Jane Lui and Moses Villarama (who doubles in the role of Courtney’s boyfriend), as well as Reed and Ngo.The Cyclos are not here just for our listening pleasure. They will turn out to be a pre-revolutionary Cambodian combo of which Chum was a member. Their band bears weighty significance in terms of both plot and theme. “In case you were not aware,” Duch informs us, “music is the soul of Cambodia.” It will also become an early casualty of the Khmer Rouge.To Yee’s credit, she neatly connects all the seemingly far-flung dots of her story. But neither her script nor Yew’s production — which features period-defining costumes by Linda Cho and lighting by David Weiner — can comfortably reconcile the radical shifts in style and mood, between the bright sardonicism of Duch’s speeches to the audience and the furrowed-brow sincerity of the father-daughter scenes.This is a shame. For there is indeed a compelling heart of darkness in “Cambodian Rock Band,” explored in a long, second-act sequence set at the S21 Prison and performed unflinchingly by Jue, Villarama and Ngo.In these scenes, Ngo’s Chum sheds his middle-aged mantle of strained affability to become a raw, quivering soul whose raison d’être is to exist, no matter the cost. And Yee’s adroit use here of the characters’ real names and assumed names becomes a heartbreaking reminder of how what we think of as a fixed human identity can melt into pulp under inhuman conditions.Cambodian Rock BandTickets Through March 15 at the Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. More

“Common Ground,” J. Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece about Boston’s turbulent attempt to desegregate its schools via court-ordered busing, is inspiring a stage play.The Huntington Theater Company in Boston plans to present the drama, called “Common Ground Revisited,” next winter, with performances starting in January. The adaptation is by Kirsten Greenidge and directed by Melia Bensussen; the two artists began collaborating on the project in 2011, when they jointly taught a class exploring the subject at Emerson College.“It’s become a delightful beast of a project — it’s huge, and it’s taken many years to figure out how to get it right, but I love the enormity of it,” Greenidge said. “It’s also highly charged, and we want to make sure that people feel seen and heard.”The journalistic book, published in 1985 with the full title of “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families,” was a sensation, particularly in Boston, as it offered new insight into the controversy over school integration that had torn the city apart. The book, as its full title suggests, follows three families as their lives are affected by the city’s turmoil in the 1960s and 1970s.The book was previously adapted for television in 1990.Greenidge noted that audiences who see the play — primarily set in the mid-1970s, with a cast of 12 playing multiple roles — are likely to have a wide variety of relationships to the history being depicted. “We will have audience members who come and say, ‘I went to Charlestown High in ’76,’ or ‘I was bused to Southie,’ and we’ll have people who are transplants and do not know this history at all, as well as people who say, ‘I know Boston has a reputation for having deep-seated problems with race, but that’s all I know.’” Part of our task is to figure out how much an audience needs to be able to track the story and connect with what we’re doing.”The play, originally commissioned by ArtsEmerson, is scheduled to begin performances Jan. 8 and run through Feb. 7 as part of the Huntington’s next season, which also includes Calista Flockhart starring in a revival of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband,” as well as productions of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” by Heidi Schreck; “Witch,” by Jen Silverman; “Teenage Dick,” by Mike Lew; “Songbird,” a musical by Michael Kimmel and Lauren Pritchard; and “Hurricane Diane,” by Madeleine George.The Huntington is only the latest regional theater to cultivate a new work of theater about its home city. Last year, Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, R.I., had a substantial hit with “The Prince of Providence,” a new play by George Brant about that city’s onetime mayor, Vincent A. Cianci Jr., widely known as Buddy. Trinity Rep has already announced plans to revive that play next year. More

Do you miss the finger snap? The new “West Side Story” has retired it. But that generation-defining gesture isn’t just the stale move of a 1950s beatnik. In the original production, based on a conception by Jerome Robbins, it set more than the beat. It was the tone, the vivacity, the pulse behind dancing that articulated the raw physicality of rage, of yearning, of love — emotions contained within a group of youthful bodies on a hot summer night.That snap may not seem like much, but in the revamped version now on Broadway, which has replaced Robbins’s choreography with new dances by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, it’s a ghost on the stage. That’s because what Robbins created wasn’t just a series of dances, however peerless, but an overarching view of how, beyond anything else, movement could tell a story.Robbins’s choreography — with its searing blend of tension and freedom — gives “West Side Story” its joy and its horror. It springs the events into action. Arthur Laurents wrote the book, but Robbins’s choreography is the true libretto.So while the stellar combination of Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics endures, dancing has always been the true star of “West Side Story,” where the overheated body is the reason these young men and women, so full of nerves and pride, are ready to burst out of their skin. Choreographers, the best ones anyway, don’t just think about steps. “The Dance at the Gym” is more than a battle between the Jets and the Sharks. It’s a physical and emotional release: A murmur that builds to a scream.While it’s understandable that the current show’s director, Ivo van Hove, and Ms. De Keersmaeker, both Belgian, would want to distance themselves from Robbins to present their own version of this classic American musical, there’s a major hitch: film. Not the 1961 one directed by Robert Wise and Robbins (until he was fired) that won a bunch of Oscars, but film you’re forced to endure throughout this production.The video, by Luke Halls, is impossible to ignore. Like a landscape painting, it stretches across the entire back of the stage, showing us ponderous footage of street scenes moving in slow motion or close-ups of the actors’ faces, both prerecorded and shot in real time. It smothers any actual aliveness.That includes, of course, the dancing, which operates, to various degrees, like wallpaper. Choreography doesn’t make this reimagined “West Side Story” breathe. (The former Miami City Ballet principal Patricia Lucia Delgado, who is also an associate producer, and the Tony-winning choreographer Sergio Trujillo are the production’s dance consultants.)Ms. De Keersmaeker is a well respected contemporary choreographer. If you know her work, it feels like a fun secret to see her spirals and circles at play on Broadway, rather than the concert stage or the floor of the Museum of Modern Art. Alas, there are problems.Even when you’re swept up by flocks of dancers sailing across the stage in formal arrangements, the choreography has little sustained urgency. Because of the looming video, you glean more of the structure of the dance — its frame — than its interior details. Ms. De Keersmaeker plays with gravity and buoyancy in her passages, which borrow from hip-hop, martial arts and house along with her own contemporary vocabulary. Yet on a stage this large and hampered by the film, the in-between moments are lost.Those transitional moments — how you get from one step to the next — are what dancing is all about. Here the choreography is part of a larger vision that renders it extraneous or, worse, inconsequential.Ms. De Keersmaeker is fond of giving her performers movement that takes them to the floor — the leads writhe in passion; the ensemble rolls and whirls — but the results can be muddled. The fight scenes look like outtakes from the 1960s “Batman” show (without words like “Kapow!” and “Sock!”).And the extended onstage rainstorm isn’t much of a thrill: The performers, sopping wet, don’t tear through the fight choreography so much as push forward with a grit-your-teeth kind of tentativeness. You can hardly blame them: A soaking floor is an injury waiting to happen.Ms. De Keersmaeker’s roots are not in musical-theater but contemporary dance where her heroes are postmodern artists like Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton. When you can make out the details of her movement here, you grasp its rippling flow and bodies, seemingly unhampered by bones.Marc Crousillat, a Shark, tells you everything you need to know about how her phrases can be transcendent — he is a vision of clarity and looseness. But there are awkward moments with many of the dancers who are not equal to sustaining qualities of drive and undulating motion. What is it all building up to?Robbins, both a micro and macro choreographer, was able to show the body’s expressiveness without self-conscious touches, while taking care that every bit of the stage served a purpose — even the negative space. And there is the naturalness of his movement, which never required that a dancer add anything extra. His way to get dancers to tone it down? He would say, “Easy.”It’s not a dirty word. Mr. Crousillat gets easy. Yet the production seems to be aiming for that cheesiest of words: gritty. It doesn’t seem to grasp that it’s important not only how a dancer leaps but how he stands. Here, the most macho gang members are almost comical: Arms hang down and curl in at either side, and feet are planted feet wide — like cowboys fresh from the gym — so as not to reveal classical turnout. It’s posturing.Robbins’s deep movement investigations revealed — and still do — how emotions, even the most imperceptible ones, live within the body. That’s not always an easy quality to draw out. Shereen Pimentel, as Maria, is a powerful singer but not a natural mover; you ache for her when she has to dash happily around the stage. And Isaac Powell, as Tony, has many charms as an actor, but when he moves — even just stretching his arms from side to side — he suddenly looks like he’s the lead in a rom-com.There are other questionable moments, as when the Sharks and the Jets position themselves on either side of Maria and Tony to pull them apart, after the couple meets at the gym. It’s an image embarrassingly more suited to an Instagram post, which is sad but fitting: This is an Instagram show.I love a modern remake or rethink. Daniel Fish’s “Oklahoma!,” which closed last month, was searing. Keone and Mari Madrid’s “Beyond Babel,” a retelling (like “West Side Story”) of “Romeo and Juliet” through West Coast urban dance, has an endearing teen-spirit sensibility. The show, at Judson Memorial Church, is overlong but genuine — and the choreography is front and center.What is this “West Side Story”? Its desire to get at something bold and contemporary seems at odds with the script’s creaky mentions of “buddy boy” and “daddy-o.” At times, it comes closer to parody, like a dream sequence on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” starring Andy Samberg as Tony. It thrusts and thrusts, yet little penetrates; for the most part, the characters remain objects — highly evolved physical beings but not so subtle emotionally.For Robbins, personalities — and their desires — grew from the inside out, just as his classical ballets grew out of pedestrian movement: standing, walking, running. And it was never obvious.He could reveal the big picture with one dancing body bursting across the stage like there was no tomorrow. For the Sharks and the Jets, that feeling — chasing freedom — is the dance. As for that snap? It anchored everything. More