THE CREATIVE MIND: A Tandoori Oven As a Crucible For Otherness
By Robin Pogrebin

Source: The New York Times (December 2, 1998) (Available through TimesSelect )

Aasif Mandvi does not need to go to the gym anymore. He has been losing weight just by performing night after night at the American Place Theater.

That is because Mr. Mandvi's one-man show,"Sakina's Restaurant," is not about one man. It is about Azgi, a young man who leaves India to work in an Indian restaurant in Manhattan. It is about Hakim, the restaurant's proprietor, who is struggling to raise two children in America and run a successful business on East Sixth Street. It is about Farrida, Hakim's wife, who feels isolated and misses home; Sakina, Hakim's teen-age daughter, who is pulled between conformity and rebellion; Samir, Sakina's younger brother, who is trying to fit in.

With the addition of a scarf or a telephone, Mr. Mandvi alternately inhabits each of these characters. They populate his play, which was highly praised by critics when it opened last summer. "While the characters are living through the Indian immigrant experience," Anita Gates wrote in The New York Times, the play's "revelations apply to anyone who feels the pull of two cultures and to a thousand variations on a loss of innocence." Variety called Mr. Mandvi "a likable and arresting storyteller who seasons his tale with a warming, infectious smile and an eagerness to please."

One-man plays that plumb personal ethnic experience are no longer novel. Two of the genre's most successful artists started out at the American Place Theater: Eric Bogosian, with his 1986 play, "Drinking in America," and John Leguizamo, whose show "Freak," moved to Broadway last season.

But Mr. Mandvi's is perhaps the first in New York to explore the experience of South Asians. And some of the city's Indians say they are grateful for it. "I could see so many of my friends' children in those kids," said Aroon Shivdasani of the Indo-American Arts Council, a new nonprofit group that tries to promote Indian artists. "It was really well done. You came out smiling."

Mr. Mandvi, 32, was born in Bombay, grew up in England and moved to the United States 16 years ago. In writing his play, he said, he purposely tried to move beyond old stereotypes, to convey the specific trials of Indian immigrants, as well as the universal experience of outsiderness. "I am an immigrant; I am the son of immigrants," Mr. Mandvi said. "I am on that fence, and that's what my show is about." In developing the characters in his play, Mr. Mandvi said, he drew largely on his own family. His own father is named Hakim; Sakina has many of the personality quirks of his younger sister; the young boy is based on Mr. Mandvi's sense of himself as a child. "Most of it is me," he said. "They're all alter egos in some ways."

Mr. Mandvi said he took his parents' experience as immigrants and put words to feelings they may not have been able to express. "I asked myself the question, 'What would my parents say, and what would they reveal about themselves if they had the insight and capacity to do that?' " he said.

When his parents finally saw the play, Mr. Mandvi said they were surprised to see him playing them. "My mother had no words really," he said. "To see her own son portraying her as a young woman when I wasn't even born yet was strange. My dad I think was flattered that I've immortalized him in this way."

The experience of shaping these specific characters has made Mr. Mandvi less tolerant of stereotypes. As a fledgling actor, he has played his share of Indian cab drivers. Now that he has an agent and has appeared in a few plays, movies and television shows, Mr. Mandvi said he feels he can be more selective about what roles he accepts.

But he also said that Americans are simply not writing multidimensional roles for Indians. That is part of what inspired him to write. He began working on the material in "Sakina's Restaurant" in his stand-up comedy act in late 1991, having turned to comedy because he was not getting roles as an actor.

He had heard about Wynn Handman, the artistic director of the American Place Theater, as the person who gave Mr. Bogosian and Mr. Leguizamo their starts. Mr. Mandvi auditioned for Mr. Handman's acting class and was accepted.

"He started bringing in these characters," Mr. Handman said. "I always felt, 'When it's really ready, I'm going to do it at American Place.' "

Over the next four years, Mr. Mandvi developed the play. He met Kim Hughes, another of Mr. Handman's students, while he was on a catering job, and she became his director. They did various workshop productions of the play in New York and elsewhere.

"Nobody really wanted to do it," Mr. Mandvi said. "They felt the subject matter was too specific and wouldn't find an audience. They didn't see it as universal."

Meanwhile, Mr. Mandvi's acting career made some progress. He got parts in "Suburbia," at the Lincoln Center Theater in 1993, and in "Death Defying Acts" at the Variety Arts Theater in 1995. He also got a few small parts in films and television shows. Last year he helped start a sketch comedy group called the Associates that has developed something of a following.

Mr. Mandvi was not impatient. After attending the University of South Florida on a theater scholarship, his first job was playing Hollywood characters at Disney MGM Studios. He said he came to New York "to stand on line" like everybody else, and he continues to commute into Manhattan from an apartment in Long Island City, Queens.

Finally, in January, 1997, he performed "Sakina's Restaurant" at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center in Florida and, a few days later, at the New York Theater Workshop. That's when Mr. Handman decided the show was ready.

"He said, 'I want to do it,' " Mr. Mandvi recalled. "It was like a dream come true."

The long road was not yet over. Mr. Mandvi said he and and Mr. Handman spent the next year raising money from the Indian community, corporate sponsors, board members and friends.

The play opened in June and is scheduled to run through the end of this year.

"Aasif combines a keen intelligence and the ability to create varied characters with great specificity," Mr. Handman said. "So there are nuances that are quite astonishing when he's doing six characters at one time."

The script is due to be published this winter by the Stage and Screen Book Club, a division of Doubleday, and Mr. Mandvi said he hoped to turn the piece into a screenplay.

"It's a living thing, so it's always evolving," he said. "I don't know if it will ever be finished."