Year Zero - A Well Fought Victory

The World Premiere of Michael Golamco's Year Zero opens this week in the new second floor studio of the historic Victory Gardens' Biograph Theater.  Year Zero is the first of a two-show premiere concluding Victory Gardens' Ignition Emerging Playwrights of Color Festival, which after this production, we should all hope will be annual event.  Golamco's Year Zero is a survival story. A first generation Cambodian-American family loses their Matriarch and wrestles with the fear of having never lived up to her expectations.  Golamco ponders the question that every Immigrant and in turn American family has dealt with, have you done whatever you could to make your parents' sacrifices worth it?

The cast and direction is superb. Nevertheless, special note should be given to Joyee Lin as the play's chief protagonist, Vuthy. Lin takes a role that potentially could have been the most annoying (a teenage boy) and plays it with elegance and subtlety.  Lin's portray gives the audience an opportunity to tap in to the frustration and angst of a teen trying to stop his family from tail spinning.  Lin's acting chops really come to the forefront in his soliloquies delivered throughout the play to a skull he keeps in a cookie jar.  He and Director Andrea J. Dymond partner to give Vuthy a Hamlet-like gravitas. 

See Year Zero for the strength of the production and cast alone. However, support it for the work that Victory Gardens is doing.  The investment they are making in young playwrights is truly an investment in the state of the American theatre on a whole and cannot be encouraged enough.  Year Zero runs through October 18 (victorygardens.org).