A new play centers a queer Cambodian American teen in Lowell

In a Merrimack Repertory Theatre rehearsal space, cast members went over a scene for the upcoming world premiere of playwright Vichet Chum’s “Kween,” about a teenage, queer, Cambodian American spoken-word artist named Soma, whose father was deported.

During the scene, Soma (played by Pichanny Som) pins her older sister Dahvy’s wedding dress in preparation for the nuptials. As Som and Dahvy (Pisay Pao) delivered their lines, they also worked through small transitions with the show’s director Pirronne Yousefzadeh. They discuss the placement of safety pins, a mirror, and the direction they should turn in relation to it. These moments, both minor and major, are things Yousefzadeh pays careful attention to.

For Yousefzadeh, “directing is 99% transitions, and everything else is cake,” she said.

In addition to transitions, Yousefzadeh also likes to dig into what she calls the “puzzle of the play,” when preparing to work on a production. In “Kween,” she said there are a few.

“I think that there's a combination of the lightness and humor of it, and the doubts and the poignancy of it,” she said, “and finding that balance and toggling between them is one of the puzzles.”

Given the ever-present threat of deportation reported in the news, particularly for noncitizens, the play feels timely. The two sisters must go on while their parents’ return to the U.S. is uncertain.

However, Chum’s narrative doesn’t really dwell too long on the knotty deportation difficulties the family faces. Instead, he intentionally centers on their everyday living.

“What I'm interested in is showing all the parts of Cambodian American life,” Chum said. “What does it mean to be a queer, young, Cambodian girl coming of age in this kind of community and all the mundane things that happen: first loves, the nuances of being attracted to another person and identifying who you are as you relate to another human being.”

In this coming-of-age story, Soma is realizing her own power, navigating a crush on a sci-fi-loving Black girl named Britney, and dealing with family changes. Amid all of that, Soma is contemplating participating in a spoken word contest at school at the behest of her bestie Sophat after a video of her performing poetry goes viral. But, doing so means Soma has to share more of herself, and she’s not sure she’s willing to do that just yet.

​“Kween” was commissioned by the MRT in 2020. The narrative, which took Chum about a year to write, was adapted into a young adult novel of the same name and published in 2023 by HarperCollins.

“Soma’s voice is what led me to her poetic impulses,” Chum said. “It really started with her clumsy, raucous, voracious voice that was speaking to me in some capacity.”

Chum, who is also Cambodian, grew up in Carrollton, Texas, where he used to write poems on his school binder. He considers Soma a much cooler and more audacious abstraction of himself.

“​Poetry in this world is a window into her interior life, into her metabolizing all the circumstances she's inundated with,” he explained. “I also think it's like a point of effervescence and energy.”

​That’s one of the things Yousefzadeh loves about the script. “The theatrical world is an extension of Soma's imagination and of her inner life,” she said. She also appreciates that Chum is “foregrounding a teenager's experience, which is often judged and minimized so much in our culture, as though young people don't have the capacity for complex thought or complex emotion.”

Centering people over political happenings seems to anchor this story about a young, queer artist and her family.

“It does feel in some way, a kind of divine healing act to be in rehearsals telling this story where the circumstances of a deportation are so critical to the narrative,” shared Yousefzadeh. “And at the same time, what we see is a story of people being people, teenagers having crushes and siblings trying to figure out how to communicate with each other, and a young person finding their artistry and finding their artistic voice.”

And healing is the hope. In all of his work, Chum writes about Cambodian and Cambodian American characters with the intention of showing interconnectedness.

“I'm deeply interested in offering people a window into our humanity and to show that we all impact one another in some way,” he said. “We are alike and we are different in many ways, and in having conversations about those two things, we can find real connection and real healing.”

The world premiere production of Merrimack Repertory Theatre’s “Kween” runs Feb. 25-March 1.