by Aasif Mandvi
“Acting is a hard profession beta, most people fail at it,” she told her son. “Wouldn’t you rather do something else?”
“No,” he replied.
Based on a mother’s intuition that her son’s conviction might be real, she said, “Well then, in that case, why don’t you write to local children’s theater companies and ask them if they will let you act?”
How she knew that children’s theater companies even existed was a mystery to her son, for it was not as if that their lives had room or excess income for the luxuries of theater. But without question he did exactly what she suggested.
She proofread each letter and added her own addendum that if they had any doubt as to her son’s talent, they should know that he had received the most positive feedback from all the other kids’ parents for his portrayal at seven years old of an Elf in the school play.
There were more than twenty letters. None of them received a reply, except for one.
The Brighouse Children’s Theatre was located in a small town that was its namesake, almost eight miles away. They invited her son to come see one of the plays they were doing to determine if the life of a thespian was a true desire.
“If I told you that you could not go,” she said upon receipt of the letter, “then what would you do?”
“I would be very sad,” came the reply.
She held him in her arms and said, as if it was an incantation protecting against the vagaries of life, “Well, beta, I won’t let you be sad.”
In that moment, performing, writing, telling stories, being on stage, applause, lights, and audiences became his life. Her son transferred all that childhood backyard conjuring to the stage at the Brighouse Children’s Theatre, and for the next three years before they all moved to America, some of the happiest, most creative Wednesday evenings of his youth happened in that modest little makeshift theater made out of an abandoned clubhouse.
Every few months they would put on a full blown production at a local town hall stage at which the parents, strangers in every other respect, would sit as peers in the audience and watch their children transform into characters from literature or fairy tales.
Perhaps she knew when she gave her son permission to join the theater that he needed its safe harbor, that in her son were rose bushes that she could not bear to see torn out. Whatever the reason was, the two of them would proudly come and see their son perform and from their seat in the audience, will his success on stage.
As I returned from my memories to the present, I realized that afternoon was turning into dusk and it was clear there was one place on my pilgrimage that I would be remiss if I didn’t visit.
I took the number thirteen bus at the top of Hollingwood Lane, just as I had done every Wednesday night as a young teen, and as it weaved its way through the narrow streets that had been carved into the Pennine mountains, I could not imagine what the Brighouse Children’s Theatre would look like today. Would it be populated with the same people that had been there twenty years earlier? I doubted it, but its image was frozen in time for me. We passed cobbled side streets, dry stone walls, graffiti-ridden park benches, fish and chip shops, and pubs, pubs, and more pubs, until the bus finally dropped me off in the tiny town of Brighouse.
I climbed the hill from the bus station as I had done so many times in my youth, but after more than an hour of walking around I realized that I was lost. The streets and the houses and the shops were all familiar to me, but I was completely turned around. I could not find the theater no matter how many turns I took.
Stymied, I walked into a pub that seemed like it might contain some helpful locals. There were a half dozen or so people sitting at the bar drinking pints, and a few old men playing cards in the corner. I asked the bartender if she had ever heard of the Brighouse Children’s Theatre. She scratched her head and said she had not. She asked a few of the other people in the pub. No one seemed to know, until one gentleman asked me what the building looked like.
“It’s a single story, wide, stand-alone building,” I said, “with a porch in front where you can sit with chairs. It looks like, umm . . . a ranch.”
“Bloody hell,” came the response from a man sitting behind a pint. “It’s J.R. bloody Ewing and he’s lost his ranch.”
The pub erupted into laughter.
“I don’t know where you think you are lad,” he continued, “but this is Yorkshire, not Dallas; there are no bloody ranches round here.”
“Thank you,” I said, smiling sheepishly, realizing that this seemed like the end to a rather disappointing homecoming.
I was about to walk out of the pub when suddenly a man from one of the back tables spoke up.
“Wait,” he said. “It looks like a cricket pavilion.”
“Yes! A cricket pavilion,” I yelped. Why had I not thought of that?
There were nods of recognition all around, and some laughter as several people put their heads together and drew out a rudimentary map on a bar napkin.
After a five minute walk I found myself in a spot I had walked by a half dozen times before entering the pub. I was standing in front of a gate that separated me from a parking lot. I had not recognized it before because, to the left, where the theater should have been, was instead simply an open field. Still a bit confused and wanting to make sure I was in the right place, I stopped a woman walking by.
“Did there used to be a building here that looked like a cricket pavilion called the Brighouse Children’s Theatre?” I asked her.
“Yes, I think they used to have theater classes here, but it burnt down almost ten years ago. It’s just been this empty field since then.”
“I see,” I said as I stared motionless at the green field where once stood a place of childhood alchemy and magic. I stood watching the unmowed grass waving slightly in the chilly evening breeze. I pushed open the gate, ignoring the no entry sign and I almost felt like laughing as I stood in the middle of the damp field.
I had gotten on planes, and trains, and buses in this quixotic journey home, having embarked upon it hoping to find the talismans and codes that I believed would help me, once and for all, explain who I was, that would help me call someplace home. As though the story of personal identity and a sense of belonging were told in hieroglyphs and one just needed to find the Rosetta Stone.
So here I was, in this field. A baby born in Bombay, a boy raised in Bradford, a teenager transplanted to Florida, and a man living in New York. My story was not one of deep and longstanding roots. I would never be from the same place as my parents, or many of my friends. I would never have an accent or a personality marking me as indelibly from a region. I would never feel fully Indian or British or American. My story would never be lived on a wholly familiar plot of land. But I could lay claim to both ranches and cricket pavilions.
My home was the one I started building on this empty field where once stood a stage. It was a place of multiplicity where I could be anything, from anywhere, at any time. It was not made of bricks and mortar, or even the sum of memories; it was an act of creation in itself. Like my parents before me, I had to build it imperfectly for myself, whether from circumstance, fate, or necessity.
I stood smiling, knowing that I had come to Bradford looking for a home that I could touch, something that had existed in the past, but in its place I found the future, to be continually created and recreated and reinvented as I had done time and time again, from a bare stage, a blank page, an empty field.
As the sun began to set over the West Yorkshire skyline, I gathered my things, walked back through the gate, and decided it was time to get back on that bus.
5. Top of the Pops is the British version of American Bandstand.
6. A sub-sect of Shiite Muslims.
PATANKING
UPON ARRIVING IN NEW YORK in the summer of 1991, I spent most mornings standing outside The Actors’ Equity Building on 46th Street at 5 A.M. holding my headshot, my résumé, a cup of coffee, and a bagel, along with hundreds of other actors
. We were all waiting to audition for an associate to the associate to the associate casting director for a role in . . . well, frankly anything. Pippin, Death of a Salesman, Romeo and Juliet, it didn’t matter. I once even stood in line for four hours to be seen for a role in A Raisin in the Sun. It’s not that I hadn’t read the play—okay fine, I hadn’t—but I had seen the movie. However, the one thing that kept me going as a young out-of-work actor was the belief that someday someone on the other side of the table would be so impressed by my monologue and/or sixteen bars of a song, that they might even be inspired to cast one really eager South Asian actor in a play about an African American family in the 1950s.
I guess it was also fair to say that there were not too many roles for South Asian actors, so although hoping to be cast as black, Latino, Native American, or Arab was a long shot, it was often the only thing available. Hey, I once played a Sephardic Jew for a murder mystery company and don’t think I didn’t put that in the special skills section of my résumé, because I did.
When I first arrived in New York, like everyone else, I was big on dreams and short on experience. For the previous two years, I had been working at theme parks in Orlando, improvising and doing comedy bits with the guests who came through the gates at Disney/MGM or Universal Studios. Other than that, when I first stepped off the train at Grand Central Station, my professional career consisted of a production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea done in the backroom of a nightclub, a production of Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp performed across the sunshine state for grades K through 3, an extra in an independent karate movie shot on location in Winter Haven, Florida, and one line on the TV show Miami Vice as the doorman outside the Biltmore Hotel. I acted the shit outta that line.
A couple of weeks after arriving in the city, I saw it as a sign that I had made the right decision when movie star and theatre legend John Malkovich exited a building and almost bumped in to me on West 46th Street. As Malkovich turned and walked toward 6th Avenue I stared at the doorway that he had just come out of. A sign above the door read The American Place Theatre. It was an unassuming building and the theater seemed to exist below street level. But it was clearly a place where movie stars hung out when they were not plastered on billboards and subway ads. This is where they go back to their roots, I thought, where they leave behind the high stakes business of the Hollywood box office for a period of time and reconnect to the simple magic of an actor standing on a stage in front of an audience telling a story. I decided that this was what I wanted. This was the door I wanted to pass through. From that moment on “being John Malkovich” became a symbolic mantra for me—until Spike Jonze stole my thunder a few years later.
The first item on my road to conquering New York was to get an agent. After eight months or so, I succeeded. I say that like it was an easy thing to do. It wasn’t. I just don’t want to bore you with the details of how to write a cover letter that is attached to a head-shot that could possibly make you stand out in the sea of a million other headshots and résumés (most of which end up in a trash can) that any actor competes against on a weekly basis in order to even get a single meeting.
My first audition was for a national television commercial. I was very excited since this could be a big payday, not to mention I was a terrible waiter. I was quickly discovering that even though I was living in a railroad apartment in Queens with a whole group of South American grad students, New York was still really expensive and it took a lot of time and effort to make just enough money to cover rent and food. A national commercial would solve a lot of my immediate problems. It was for the role of a snake charmer in a commercial for an insurance company (or possibly a bank). Either way, a snake charmer was an odd choice I thought, but why they needed one was not my concern, as long as they were going to pay me. I walked into the audition room and, after stating my name, I was asked to read some lines off a cue card while pretending to charm a snake out of a basket. I picked up the fake flute and pretended to play while I said the lines for the camera. After I was done the director conferred with his cohorts and then asked me something that seemed obvious to them, but took me by surprise.
“Could you do it again, this time with an Indian accent?” he asked.
Now, truth be told, I had never been asked to do an Indian accent before. Even though I had been born in India, I left as an infant and grew up in the UK and then in the U.S. where the coalescing of my West Yorkshire and Floridian accents made me sound like I was from Brooklyn. I wasn’t even sure if I could do an Indian accent. The only Indian accent I had any reference to was my parents’ and the last thing any immigrant kid wants to sound like is his father.
However, I was an actor and this was a paying gig, so I picked up the flute and gave it a go. It was terrible. I couldn’t do it. I prided myself on being able to do most any accent; British, Irish, French, Italian, Hispanic, but for some reason I could not do an authentic Indian accent. I knew how it was supposed to sound, I had heard it all my life, but my mouth and voice refused to create the sound in my head. Like a tone deaf singer, I was Indian-accent deaf. I couldn’t find the lilt, the upward inflection, the clipped consonants. I even wobbled my head from side to side the way Indians have been doing for thousands of years, hoping it would shake loose the accent buried inside of me, but no such luck. The words coming out of my face sounded like either an effeminate Russian or a very polite Arab, but definitely not an Indian.
To my surprise, however, the producers seemed unfazed.
“Well done, that was great,” the director said.
“One more question,” he continued after a moment. “Do you own your own turban?”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Our wardrobe girls don’t know how to tie a turban, so if you happen to own your own turban . . .”
“I don’t,” I said, “I don’t own a turban because . . . well because I don’t wear a turban.”
“Of course,” he said, starting to sound slightly uncomfortable.
“If I owned a turban I would probably have worn it,” I continued. “It’s not something you leave home without.”
I don’t know why I was combative. Perhaps because I still couldn’t believe they could not tell that I had just done the shittiest Indian accent ever heard. Did they not care? Didn’t they know what an Indian accent was supposed to sound like? Seems like a pretty essential bit of information if you’re casting a commercial featuring an Indian snake charmer.
“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.”
