Letters From Home

Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Independent Shakespeare Company
Through November 18

In her solo show, writer performer Kalean Ung crafts a sensitive and lovely portrait of life with her father Chinary Ung, an immigrant to the United States from Cambodia. Her dad didn’t exactly flee his homeland when Pol Pot came to power in the 1970s; rather, he was a student in the U.S. at the time the Khmer Rouge took over, and he managed to gain U.S. citizenship after that.

As a U.S. resident, safe from the horrors afflicting the family back in Cambodia, Chinary was frequently the object of desperate communications from relatives suffering in the refugee camps of Thailand. It is these understandably demanding, appalling missives, tragic in their content and striking in their need, that are the “letters from home” of the work’s title.

Directed by Marina McClure, who imbues it with a dream-like quality, this thought-provoking play articulates the debt that the safe and secure owe to the less fortunate and the imperiled.

Ung tells her story with a gentleness filled with wistful melancholy: She has had a lovely life in America, and her father was able to get many of her relatives to safety, but the world is still hard and cruel. She filters the hyper-intensity of the emotions she’s describing by peppering her stories with monologues from Pericles, Othello and Henry VI. Juxtaposing accounts of Cambodian atrocities with Shakespeare might at first seem coy and pretentious, but it packs an unexpected wallop. It’s testament to the timelessness of cruelty, particularly in an exceptionally moving rendering of Queen Margaret’s speech from Henry VI.

Chinary was a music professor and well-known classical composer, and the play features musical interludes that showcase his music, which hauntingly captures a sense of loss and longing. Indeed, it often feels as though the text is a mere wraparound for these awesome compositions.

That said, worthy and deeply personal as this production is, it nevertheless lacks the dramatic heft of a storyline. The personal anecdotes are indeed moving and nicely executed, and McClure stages them with sensitivity, but there is no actual drama in the narrative, and the results are a show that is perhaps slighter and more ephemeral than it might be.

Independent Studios, 3191 Casitas Ave., Ste. 130, Atwater Village; Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 3 pm; through Nov. 18. (818) 710-6306 or www.iscla.org. Running time: 80 minutes with no intermission.