LOWELL — Charles Towers knew what he was looking for. He just didn’t know if it existed.
Towers, the artistic director of Merrimack Repertory Theatre, at one point had Googled the term “Cambodian theater.” The search engine responded: “Do you mean Canadian theater?”
That’s because there was no there there. In Lowell, Cambodian-Americans make up 12.5 percent of the population, the largest percentage of any city in the country, according to the US Census (though Mayor Rodney Elliott believes they’ve been “extremely undercounted”). That made Towers’s quest to find a theater piece that would connect with the Cambodian-American experience all the more critical.
“It was always in our mind to find a piece that would allow us to speak to our full community,” said Towers, who has led the MRT since 2001. “The problem is that there is no Cambodian Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams.”
But there is Michael Golamco, a screenwriter/playwright of Chinese/Filipino descent who wrote “Year Zero” in 2009. The play, the first production of MRT’s 2014-15 season, opened Thursday and will run through Oct. 5.
“Year Zero” springs from the event that eventually resulted in the exodus of so many Cambodians to the United States: the Khmer Rouge takeover of the country in 1975 with its goal to eradicate all existing Cambodian culture and traditions — returning the country to “Year Zero” — and the subsequent genocide of 1.7 million people.
Towers describes the play, which has had three productions, including a run in New York City in 2010, as a “funny, touching” look at a Cambodian-American teen named Vuthy Vichea (Daniel Velasco). Vuthy loves hip-hop and Dungeons & Dragons and wears thick glasses, a weird kid in a place where weirdness can be fatal: Long Beach, Calif. And since his best friend moved and his mother died, the only thing he talks to is a human skull he keeps hidden in a cookie jar.
The rest of the cast includes Juliette Hing-Lee as Vuthy’s older sister, Ra, Michael Rosete as neighbor Han, and Arthur Keng as Ra’s boyfriend, Glenn.
“Year Zero” speaks to Hing-Lee on several levels; she attended Lakewood High in Long Beach, the same high school attended by her character in the play. Born in a Chicago suburb, she moved to Long Beach with her mother at the age of 8 after her parents separated. Long Beach is the only city in the country whose Cambodian-American population surpasses Lowell’s.
“It was extreme culture shock,” she said. “There weren’t any Cambodians around, and suddenly there was a large community that looked like me.”

Her father was in the Cambodian navy in 1975 when he got wind of what was about to happen and fled the country with his family intact. Hing-Lee’s mother wasn’t as fortunate; she was forced to leave her eight brothers and sisters behind, and many didn’t survive.
“The piece is extremely important because it puts into words the experience of Cambodians who came to this country and what they’ve gone through,” said Hing-Lee. “Year Zero” is the first play she has acted in with Cambodian-American characters.
Golamco said the idea for the play came from a college friend who was Cambodian-American.
“When I asked my friend what she knew of her parents’ history, she said that her parents told her very little; they wanted to shield their children from what they had gone through,” he said by e-mail. “For me this ignited the idea that turned into the core of the play: How does history get transmitted between generations? Who do we share our stories and memories with, and when do they disappear? I thought that was a really interesting and universal idea that goes beyond what happened in Cambodia — it’s an idea that touches all of us.”
Golamco said as an outsider writing about the community, he tried to be as authentic as possible and pay attention to the details while still serving the storytelling and narrative needs of the play.
The MRT has been working with a cultural advisory committee in Lowell to provide perspective and connections to the community since the play was selected for the 2014-15 season last year.
“We don’t have theater [in Cambodia] in the Western sense,” said Linda Sopheap Sou, executive director of the acclaimed Angkor Dance Troupe, which has forged a partnership with the MRT. “We use music and dance for storytelling. The closest we probably come is the tradition of using shadow puppets to tell a story.”
Sou’s troupe will perform at
5 p.m. on Sept. 28 at the MRT’s Nancy Donahue Theatre, one of several events the theater company has planned around the run of “Year Zero,” including two post-show panel discussions with members of the Cambodian community on Sept. 17 and 24, and a discussion and book signing with “The Years of Zero” author Seng Ty on Sept. 21.

Towers said the production won’t be a success if the city’s Cambodian-Americans aren’t engaged. “It would be sad if we did an excellent job and only the subscribers showed up,” he said. “Our goal is to have the seats filled up with members from the entire community.”
Rich Fahey can be reached at fahey.rich2@gmail.com