Entering through green double doors marked “QUIET PLEASE” and into the vestibule of Harvard University’s staid Leverett House, I am presently accosted by pleasant whiffs of Indian cuisine. An affable Indian waiter is busy serving mango lassi behind his table of concessions, and a mostly-Indian crowd savor samosas as they chatter away energetically in anticipation of the final performance of Harvard South Asian Association’s “Sakina’s Restaurant”. The cramped space is bubbling over with desi talk and chicken tikka masala, and seems to depict a microcosm of the play itself: Delectable, strangely familiar, and richly textured with spicy characters, ”Sakina’s Restaurant” portrays the assorted lives of Indian immigrants in America through a series of vignettes staged in an Indian restaurant on Manhattan’s East Sixth Street.

There is the Indian village boy Azgi, who sets off from his Bombay home to pursue his American Dream; Mr. Hakim, the owner of “Sakina’s Restaurant” and boss to Azgi, who despairs over the Americanization of his two children; the wistful Mrs. Hakim who gave up her aspiring career in Indian classical dance only to find America inhospitable and ungrateful; the eponymous Sakina, a second-generation Indian teen who feels complete in neither cultures; her 10-year-old brother Samir, on the other hand, who embraces Western culture with complete and physical devotion (embodied in a Ninja Turtle kick, for example); and Ali, a devout practitioner of Medical School and also of Islam, who has been betrothed to Sakina since age 7. Through these valiant, real-to-life portrayals, the play not only sheds light on the South Asian immigrant experience but also illuminates the economic exploitation, lack of understanding – and, in the wake of 9/11, outright hostility – towards recent immigrants to the US across the board. Of this formidable reality the six characters in “Restaurant” each carve out and define their own personal realities, sometimes corresponding to and other times contradicting each other in a style akin to “Rashomon.” Rather than dwell on the conflicts, however, the individual vignettes succeed in teasing out affection and identity among the characters, thereby rendering the play heartwarmingly comic at its best moments.

Aasif Mandvi, playwright and sole-cast member of the original Off Broadway production of Sakina's Restaurant, took inspiration from his own and his parents� immigrant experience in the UK and the US to craft a stand-up comedy piece. Along with Mandvi, Kimberley Hughes developed Sakina's Restaurant over the course of four years, and also won an Obie Award for directing the play Off-Broadway. The play that later emerged out this effort was originally scheduled to run for three months in New York, but ended up running for a total of 10 months. One reviewer of Restaurant has hailed it a play of historic importance as the first Off Broadway and mainstream American play to focus on the lives of South Asian immigrants. Yet another reviewer has quipped, It unfortunately comes as no surprise that the Bombay-born actor had to write the play for himself because there's a dearth of South Asian roles on the New York state, and had he relied on the typical job offers from film or TV he might still be playing cab-drivers. Either way, Mandvi ended up winning two Obie Awards in 1999 and had toured the world with Restaurant in response to international rave reviews. He has also performed for numerous grassroots organizations in the US the likes of Sakhi, a women's empowerment group based in New York City.

Add to the original brilliance of the play the innovativeness and sheer energy poured in to the Harvard production of “Sakina’s Restaurant,” and we are left with nothing short of an exhilarating evening of theatre. It is of little wonder, then, that the shows sold out virtually by word of mouth. As the audience crowded into the Leverett Old Library for the final performance of “Restaurant,” I sensed among them a unanimous confidence in the goodness of what is to come. This inherently non-cynical attitude of the audience infected laughter and elicited sympathetic nods throughout the play as the actors portrayed fleshy human beings as familiar as that person you once heard of/saw/were.

For one thing, the acting was simply delectable. The two lead actors – Rupak Battacharya as Azgi/Mr.Hakim/Ali and Amar C. Bakshi as Sakina/Mrs.Hakim/Samir – enamored the house with their powerful, honest, and confident performances. The director, Kiran Deol, and producers Sharon Doku and Ishani Ganguli obviously have made some sublime casting decisions. Diverging from the original one-actor scheme, the Harvard interpretation offered a populated flair by introducing characters Mandvi did not originally personify. Hence Tom, Sakina’s American ex-boyfriend, is played with rough-hewn nonchalance by Marty Dinn to help escalate Sakina’s exasperation in her monologues; and a group of jazzy singers helped lyrically emphasize the main themes of the play with songs such as “Movin’ On Up” and “The American Dream.”

The stage setting and use of the Leverett Old Library space proved equally ingenious and effective. At the very beginning of the show, the audience was tentatively made to stand along the fringes of heavy velvet curtains that severed them from the cavernous and imaginative space beyond. The play begins when Asgi and a fellow village friend (played by Bakshi) emerges from within the audience to perform in the narrow confines of the part-audience, part-stage space allocated to them before the curtains. As Asgi parts with his mother, boards on a jet, and arrives at America with his carefully tucked letter of sponsorship, the lead Singer Paris Woods delivers “Movin’ On Up” with power and grace as the heavy curtains part and – voila! – the audience transcends over time and space to New York City’s Sakina’s Restaurant. To add to this delight, audience members were made to seat at dining tables with actual food with actual water with actual linen – in other words, in an actual restaurant setting – as they watched the entirety of “Sakina’s Restaurant” unfold before them right there at Sakina’s Restaurant.

The director, Kiran Deol, understands that theatrical humor originates from gaps that exist between what people expect and what really happens on stage, as apparent from her mastery in accentuating the various shades of humor in “Restaurant.” She capitalizes on the “drag queen effect” of casting Bakshi as Sakina: short, snazzy dance stints accompanied by songs like “American Woman” and “One Kiss” elicit the look of fiery temptress from Bakshi and unfailingly sent the house roaring in laughter. Switches between one character to another played by the same actor is abrupt, unexpected, paradoxical, and somehow extremely funny, as we see Mr. Hakim transform into Azgi with one sharp ring of the phone. And as Azgi bounces over in his aeroplane seat and cluelessly blurts out a song about women and tits, the audience laughs not because of ridicule but because the laughter qualifies and pardons similar personal blunders under the broader context of the immigrant experience. Later on in the play, in her most poignant moment, Mrs. Hakim laments to her husband: “By making fun of me, you are making yourself look ridiculous.” Self-mockery translates into laughter, and laughter translates into a cohesive experience. By infusing the otherwise somber reality of an American Dream with humor, both the playwright and the director elevate “Restaurant” to art.

Deol’s “Sakina’s Restaurant” succeeded in one more feat: it commemorated and iconified various impalpable phenomena we encounter in our mundane lives by portraying them in abstract symbols that stuck to our minds long after we have left the show. The elusive American Dream is represented by a rubber chicken sporting a dangly “Armani” tie and stuffed in a toy car to be pushed into the impending darkness off stage. Mrs. Hakim cradles a yellow sash into an infantile form of Sakina, before it is unraveled and tugged in preciously by Mr. Hakim, becoming the very memory of that moment for him and for the audience. Then there is the indelible shadow of the Indian classical dancer (Mridula Raman) projected on a crimson screen, symbolizing both the stealth and the ubiquity of traditions.

In conclusion, “Sakina’s Restaurant” rates among the highest in my personal Zagat Survey of university theatre. It may very well be the best. But ambitious Deol considers her six shows at Harvard as mere previews, mentioning that “real” performances usually reserve roughly the same number of shows as warm-ups before their production gets on a roll. Deol is, clearly, on a roll. It is my wish that her aspirations will one day come to grace American mainstream theatre to follow in the steps of Mandvi himself.

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