No Land's Man (14 page)

“Of course,” said the director, “that makes sense. We just thought.... Do you know how to tie one, because . . . ?”

“No, I don’t,” I said flatly.

That’s when it got weird.

“Sorry to ask you this,” one of the assistants piped up sheepishly, “but we are asking everyone. Do you know how to actually snake charm?”

“I don’t,” I said, “but I am Indian so it’s probably in my DNA.”

There was a pause.

“Of course,” the director said. “Sorry. They are silly questions but the client insists. So let’s do it again and this time don’t worry about being too big, because we want this to be funny.”

In most other auditions, this would have been at best an innocuous comment and at worst, just lazy direction, but I was beginning to realize he wasn’t talking about being funny. He was talking about something else, something that was making me uncomfortable. I loved performing because it had always been a place where I felt freedom, acceptance, and expansion. In theater school, in plays, at theme parks, whenever I performed it had only ever brought me joy. But now, in this moment, for the first time, I felt something I had never felt before: shame. I knew that I was about to do something
that my parents would be embarrassed to see. My stomach tightened as I imagined my friends attempting to be supportive and smile as they watched me on television doing this potentially offensive caricature. I thought for a moment. I could walk out. I could stand up and say,
this makes me uncomfortable. I didn’t come to New York to be Apu. I came to . . . to . . . “being John Malkovich.”
Which would sound a bit “Tourette’s-y” I admit, but nevertheless would affirm my mantra and make a great exit line.

I stared at their faces, these nice, smiling Caucasian people, who had no idea what they were asking me to do. Then I remembered that rent was due at the end of the month. Would I once again ask my landlady for a little more time? Every month I gave her the same sob story. I remembered how much I hated waiting tables, I remembered that paralegal job where reading a three-hundred-page legal brief about faulty valves had actually made me consider suicide. I remembered that there were ten other actors sitting outside the door that would do this part, no questions asked, and laugh all the way to the bank. If I didn’t do this on principle, one of them would, and then what difference would it make? What statement would I be making? Maybe if I did do it, I could have control over it. I could give this bobble-headed, snake-charming cartoon character some nuance, complexity, humanity. I mean for God’s sake what was my problem? It was a fucking stupid commercial. I should just do it, take the money, and this time next year no one would even remember it. But I would know, I thought to myself. I would hate every minute of shooting it and I would spend the next few months before it aired feeling anxious and humiliated.

I stood up from the lotus position to confront them . . . and also because it’s an incredibly uncomfortable way to sit for a long time.

“So, you want it to be broader?” I said to the director. “You want it to be more like a cartoon?”

“Well, we want it to be funny,” they said as they looked at each other. “The accent, the head wobble, it all makes it funnier. We want it to be funny.”

I looked at them in the eye took a deep breath and said, “Okay, I think I know what you want.”

I sat down and assumed the lotus position. I wobbled my head from side to side. I channeled the broadest Indian accent I could think of by pretending to be Peter Sellers in
The Party
. I channeled Apu from
The Simpsons
. I even channeled Fisher Stevens in brown face from that ’80s robot movie. I was actually trying to appear on national television doing the same accent that, if someone had done it in front of me, I would have punched them in the mouth.

The whole thing worked like a snake charm, for the more I did it, the more the producers smiled and soon they were laughing uncontrollably, especially when I smiled and stared at them as if I didn’t understand what they were saying. I attempted to soothe my humiliation by focusing on how much money I would make by hitting what was clearly the brown cash cow jackpot.

“Dude, that was so funny,” said the director when I had finished. “Thank you so much for being a good sport. I know it is probably a little politically incorrect, but it’s comedy, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “I totally get it. Anything for a laugh.”

I did not get the job. I assumed that they had cast some other brown actor better studied in the art of snake charming, and to be honest part of me was relieved. However, when I saw the commercial
a few months later I saw to my horror that they had cast a swarthy looking white guy. There he was, bobbing his head from side to side, smiling and talking with a broad, terrible Indian accent without a care in the world as to what his parents would think of him as he charmed the shit out of that rubber snake.

Though I was never asked to play a snake charmer again, I soon noticed a peculiar pattern in the roles I auditioned for—cab drivers, deli owners, doctors, and terrorists. As time went on I became more and more numb to what was being asked of me. My friend, Sakina Jaffrey, a South Asian actress, even coined a name for it: Patanking. The word is derived from parodying the sound of an Indian accent to the ear of a white person: “patank patank patank.” Say it to yourself. Did you do it? (Yes, this part of the book is interactive.) Now try saying it with an Indian accent. Give it a shot. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Did you do it? Now wobble your head from side to side. (This will be difficult if you are not South Asian since it’s a motion that is confounding to westerners but is instinctively understood by anyone who has even one drop of subcontinental blood in their veins. Don’t worry if you don’t do it perfectly. You never will.) Okay, now that you are saying “patank patank patank” and wobbling your head from side to side like a dashboard bobble head you are experiencing what my first few years as an actor in New York felt like. (If you are laughing right now, you’re a racist!)

Patanking was not just a dialect. It happened when an Indian character in a movie or a TV show or a commercial was void of any human element, and became simply a disembodied accent, head wobble, or turban. It was also sometimes the only way to make a living, and I was completely culpable for I gladly patanked my way as far up the ladder as I could.

Eventually I didn’t even think about it. I gladly served up a one-dimensional cartoon of my culture and family for the entertainment of Middle America. I turned a blind eye to things that I could not justify, such as why a character born and raised in the west would even have an Indian accent. Why a character that was clearly Indian would be named Epstein. Why a Muslim character would have a Hindu name. Why an Indian would be speaking Arabic. Why a character originally written as black or Hispanic or Jewish could just as easily be played by an Indian without needing to change a single piece of vernacular. Why a tanned white actor could play South Asian, but a light skinned South Asian could not play white. Why an Iranian accent sounded identical to an Indian one. Why South Asian actors could be funny or nerdy but never sexy, yet South Asian actresses had to be. I got so used to twisting myself into a metaphorical pretzel in order to fit in to the way that Hollywood portrayed South Asian or Middle Eastern characters that I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

But then something began to change. After playing countless South Asian stereotypes, I began to feel a need to create something real. If I was professionally not able to play anything more than a peripheral and undeveloped character (except for some reason in Shakespeare and in school, because apparently nontraditional casting is okay if the audience doesn’t know what the actors are talking about or if it’s for educational purposes), then I would tell those stories myself. I started writing characters from my ethnic and immigrant experience, in hopes of creating a one-man show. The characters were unlike any that I had ever had the chance to play. They were as complicated and conflicted as the people they were inspired by. For the first time the audience would not think,
“Look, nontraditional casting. Good for them, that’s very progressive,” when they saw me walk on stage, as they had in every play I had ever done. This time they wouldn’t even notice. They would just see a South Asian actor portraying three dimensional South Asian characters. There would be no suspension of disbelief. Except for the usual kind.

With this in mind, I began to write what would become my one-man show
Sakina’s Restaurant
. The first character I developed, Sakina, was a combination of me and my sister. I quickly realized that though the play would enable me to return to my roots, it would require me to do some nontraditional casting of another variety—I would have to play all ages and genders. So one of the first things I did was put on a pair of heels and a mini skirt and walk around my apartment to see how it felt to talk and walk like a teenage Indian girl.

After Sakina, I wrote a character based on my father and for the first time I tried to reveal him, rather than lampoon him. I attempted to give the character of Mr. Hakim an authentic immigrant voice, to uncover how he might actually feel about the emotional and cultural price he paid for his American Dream. I wrote a character based on my mother’s experience of being a young woman seeking romance within an arranged marriage. I continued writing characters and eventually crafted an entire family made from bits and pieces of my relatives and others like them.

The last character I wrote was a South Asian Muslim medical student who has sex with a prostitute the night before his wedding. The monologue’s literal and metaphorical climax involves the prostitute performing oral sex on him while he prays to God for forgiveness. I was very proud of it and so when my girlfriend at the time,
an actress herself (no doubt sick and tired of coming home to the sights and sounds of her boyfriend either wearing heels or having loud sex with imaginary prostitutes), told me that Wynn Handman, the artistic director of the American Place Theatre, had an acting class and that I should audition for it, I leapt at the chance.

Wynn had helped develop the careers of hundreds of notable actors, but more important to me, he had helped develop the solo performance careers of monologue-makers such as Eric Bogosian and John Leguizamo. The prospect of auditioning for him was intimidating, but it was kismet that he also owned the same theater that I had seen Malkovich walk out of a few years earlier.

Upon entering his studio in Carnegie Hall, which was a small black box type space with about forty or so wooden seats raked up toward the back wall where the students would sit, I spotted Wynn seated in what I would come to know as “his” chair, off to the side, next to the light board. He was an older man in his seventies and he didn’t seem to have a lot of patience. So after the perfunctory hellos he got right down to business.

“So what are you going to do for me?” he asked.

“I’m writing a one-man show,” I told him. “I have written an original monologue.”

“Okay, go ahead,” he said with no enthusiasm whatsoever as he dimmed the lights in the studio.

“I have to take off my pants,” I called as the stage went black. “It’s part of the piece. I’m going to be receiving oral sex from a prostitute.”

Wynn was silent. In the darkness I heard him shift his weight and sigh. Then, without a word, he slowly turned on one blue stage
light, enough to see that he wouldn’t have to call Carnegie Hall security. He saw me standing there smiling in my boxers with my pants around my ankles.

“Are you going to be removing any more of your clothing?” he inquired.

“No, just my pants,” I responded.

“Tell me when you are ready to begin,” he said and turned off the blue light.

I spent the next several years in Wynn’s class honing and developing the characters I had written. Wynn gave me the tools to take my raw material and insert dramatic tension, to create real characters and not just mouthpieces for a point I wanted to make. He helped me shape my ideas into human beings. The act of revealing real South Asian characters on stage that were not caricatures or peripheral brown people in some white writer’s POV but actually the focus of the story, was transformative and empowering and validating in a way that nothing I had done up to that point had been.

When I was finally ready, after workshopping the play in various downtown theaters, Wynn offered to premiere
Sakina’s Restaurant
at the American Place Theater. It was 1998, almost seven years after I had gone to that audition for a snake charmer. I had been unable to appreciate or access my own accent and cultural identity when I first came to New York and now I was standing on a stage portraying a South Asian American family for a New York City theater audience.

As soon as word got out about the show, South Asian audiences came from all over the tri-state area. Many of them had never seen a story that reflected their experience, their culture, or themselves
on stage before. It wasn’t just South Asians, either. I was surprised to find how much Indian immigrants had in common with Greeks, Italians, Arabs, and even a family of Russian Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn. They came and kept coming, and a show that was supposed to run for two weeks managed to stay open for six months.

On the night the show closed, I walked out on to 46th Street and stood staring at the poster on the front of the theater for one last time. Suddenly I heard my name. I turned around and saw a lanky Indian kid in his early twenties.

“Hey,” he said nervously. “I just saw your show. It was amazing and I wondered if you would sign my program.”

“Sure,” I said, and while I did he told me he was an actor and had just arrived in the city.

“My parents didn’t want me to be an actor,” he explained, “but I’ve wanted to since I was a kid.”

“Great,” I said. “I wish you the best.”

“I played so many great roles in college,” he continued, “but now, it’s hard. I only get auditions to play stupid roles. I’m sick of only being a cab driver or your friendly neighborhood terrorist. It’s so humiliating. How did you manage to avoid it?”