South Asian Actors Make Their Presence Felt
by Sonia Chopra

Source: Business English Training Worldwide (Full-text article)

Slowly but gradually, South Asian actors are becoming a powerful presence. They show up everywhere, in plays, television sitcoms and movies, sharing the limelight with Hollywood stars, getting good reviews and making a name for themselves. To reflect the '90s class of immigrants, who are suave, cosmopolitan and educated doctors, engineers and computer specialists, actors too have moved up a couple of notches.

It looks like the days of the quick scenes of taxi-drivers and street vendors with their exaggerated gestures and accents are out. A big factor is the drive and ambition of the new breed of actors who are pushing their marketability.

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While these actors are fitting into any roles, there are others who explore the feelings of South Asian immigrants. Aasif Mandvi is perhaps the first to do that with his Sakina's Restaurant. He wrote, produced and acted out five roles in the play which was scheduled to run for a month, but ran six months off-Broadway.

"I have played my share of cab-driver roles," says Mandvi. "I'm not going to be playing any more... unless they pay me an obnoxious amount of money." Mandvi, who paved his own passage to stardom, wrote his play as part of a standup comedy act. A year later, when he was accepted into Wynn Handman's theatrical class at The American Place Theatre in New York, it began to take the form of a play. Handman, a legend in acting circles, has been teaching stars such as Michael Douglas, Richard Gere, Alec Baldwin and Denzel Washington since the 1960s. "Aasif is highly intelligent and very original. He's gifted and talented enough to use that gift to portray his observations," says Handman, who called Mandvi's play a milestone. "To draw on his immigrant experience... to write about it, to explore it, it's the logical thing to do."

But Mandvi says immigrant actors still have a long way to go before Hollywood comes calling. "There are no South Asian actors in Hollywood because there are no South Asian writers in Hollywood. We need more writers to write multi-dimensional roles. A guy from Connecticut who goes to Hollywood to be a scriptwriter cannot possibly write interesting roles for ethnic actors," says Mandvi, who is currently writing a screenplay that draws its inspiration from the characters in his play. Nisha Ganatra, an independent film-maker whose first feature film, Chutney Popcorn, has received three awards already, agrees with Mandvi and challenges the audience to react to the films, to get a change. "Audiences hold a tremendous amount of power. The opening weekend at movies can help determine whether Hollywood will make more of a given type of movie. Send a message, go to the opening weekend and you will see more of those kind of movies," says Ganatra.

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