The self is his muse

If Shishir Kurup looks familiar, it is probably because you have seen him in your living room.

Maybe it was in Heroes, in which he plays Nirand in the scenes set in Chennai.

Or West Wing, where he jokes with C.J. about her press-leak witch-hunt. Or Surface, when the bandages came off and Dr Krishna Singh is miraculously healed. Maybe Sleeper Cell? NYPD Blue?

But given that Kurup is a talented and successful writer, director and musician, it is with a certain reluctance that he talks about this highly visible work, which also includes roles in the 1993 film Coneheads and the 1998 Nicolas Cage starrer City of Angels.

It was in the City of Angels that Weekend Review met Kurup, specifically in Marina Del Ray, one of the cities that make up Los Angeles.

About 4 kilometres from the Pacific, the temperature in his ground-floor flat is perfect.

Kurup is in shorts and kurta-like shirt. Around the room are three electric guitars and one acoustic instrument on stands (he owns “12 or 13'' guitars), guitar amplifiers, a few drums, a bookcase full of CDs, another full of DVDs and a wall of books at the back.

It is, to a writer and music fan, the perfect room.

Tri-cultural enigma

Once talking, Kurup is both an interviewer's dream and nightmare. Dream, because he is a mine of great copy; nightmare because he is a hard man to pin down to a specific answer.

In the end, this writer sat back and just enjoyed being part of a talk best described as “unfettered''.

Answers to questions led to interesting anecdotes, musings about identity and the diaspora experience, philosophical asides and a discussion on Hindi music of the 1950s and rock music of the 1970s.

Born in Mumbai and raised in Kenya and the United States, Kurup describes himself as a “transplanted person who is trans-cultural and tri-cultural''.

Those are not just big words, though. When Kurup uses the collective pronoun “we'', it is time to concentrate, because in one sentence it may refer to India, and in the next, the US.

These unselfconscious cultural segues are reflected in Kurup's work, notably in his play Merchant on Venice.

The work, written in blank verse, is Kurup's multi-cultural retake of Shakespeare's notorious play of nearly the same name.

(The prepositional change is because the title character is a merchant on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles.) And in the same way that Kurup says “we'' for two disparate cultures, the play is as thoroughly Angeleno (a resident of Los Angeles) as it is Indian.

Merchant was recently a success in Chicago, getting excellent reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times.

Chris Jones, the Tribune theatre critic, wrote: “If Kurup could somehow get his script, say, in the hands of the right person at the Royal Shakespeare Company, this play might actually help that company better reflect the world in which they (and Shakespeare) now operate.''

In a remarkably similar vein, Hedy Weiss, theatre critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, opens her review with: “Note to New York's Public Theatre, producer of Shakespeare in Central Park: Send a scout to see the Silk Road Theatre Project's hip, funny, ingeniously reconfigured world premiere of Merchant on Venice, Shishir Kurup's reinvention of Shakespeare's most controversial play.''

They were amazing reviews, says Kurup. “I can use those reviews till my dying day.''

Rejections to die for

And deservedly so, for Merchant is a clever, funny and powerful play.

“This play is getting fantastic rejections,'' Kurup says. This means that large national theatres are responding, saying they love it but are not going to do it.

The Lincoln Centre was one. Kurup reads from a rejection letter that praises the play and then says: “We don't feel it will work here for various reasons.

I think it needs a more informal setting to convey its special fizz.''

“Special fizz? What does that mean?'' Kurup asks. He goes on to interpret: “What she is saying is, it's a choice to not be as adventurous as they could be.'' After all, Merchant calls for one Latino and ten South Asian actors.

“There's not even one white person in it,'' he says, alluding to the deep conservatism that still runs in the theatre.

Issues of identity feature a lot when Kurup talks about his work and run through the heart of Merchant, which plays on the tension between Devendra, a Hindu merchant, and Sharuk, a wealthy Muslim who just wants to be heard.

“I think that is the larger conversation we are having with the Muslim world,'' Kurup says. “And the Muslim world is not being heard.''

Time to listen

Kurup has had his share of not being heard, or at least, being heard in strange ways.

The Indian population in Africa had an uneasy place, regarded as a buffer class between whites and blacks.

And when he moved to the US, it was to a white suburban neighbourhood where he had to put up with (serious) questions such as: “Did you swing from trees like Tarzan?'' and “Did you live in a mud hut?''

From this to stones being thrown at him in a freshly post-9/11 New York to being called the N-word, to being beautiful, fantastic and exotic, Kurup has seen a whole range of racist expression.

While he would, naturally, prefer being the fantastic exotic to being strung from a tree, it is all, he says, dehumanisation.

“Ultimately it's the dehumanisation that allows you to kill people. It's being denied full citizenship that one struggles with.''

With no trace of self-pity or anger, he delivers the startling summation: “I was the exotic monkey.''

He gives the impression that he has not only come to terms with these travails of trans-culturalism but recognises — even reaps — the richness they give his character and experience.

When he talks of identity, Kurup often uses musical references as a way to describe mindsets and phases of his personality.

Talking about his acting experiences on television [see box], he says: “I don't get starstruck but I'd be musician-struck.''

He imitates how he would behave if he was on a show with Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page or The Who's Roger Daltrey. “And, if it was Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, I wouldn't be able to speak!''

Kurup also talks with great fondness of Hindi film songs from the 1950s and worries about the modern trends in music from Bollywood.

But Kurup's juiciest observations and tales are those when an audition is involved.

Kurup was, he says, part of the second wave of South Asian actors in America and most of the roles until then were the stereotypical, heavily accented, head-shaking ones that involved the character being the butt of the joke.

Kurup refused to play them that way, achieving this either through belligerence, as he put it, or negotiation.

One time, when asked to imitate Peter Sellers (in the comic actor's role as Hrundi Bakshi in The Party), he played dumb (or, more accurately, played intelligent) and asked: “You mean Peter Sellars, the avant-garde director? You want me to imitate him?''

Today it is getting better, he says, but is still not enough. After all, there are only so many times one can play a surgeon who appears to make an announcement about the health of a character and then vanishes.

Kurup has been careful to choose roles that offer “an arc'', a clear development of character.

Also, fortunately, it is becoming bad form to ask for the caricature accent.

“I think that is a direct result of people standing up and saying I'm not going to do this heavy accent.

Or refusing [to audition]. I've actually refused to go into auditions, saying I've read the thing, it's heinous and I'm not going to do this.''

Moving from his personal to his professional identity, Kurup says that for 15 years it has been Los Angeles-based Cornerstone Theatre, described on its website as a multi-ethnic, ensemble-based theatre company.

“It's a theatre company and the work we do is very specific. Cornerstone began around the notion of bringing theatre to communities.''

Kurup didn't start the company but has been actively involved with its life in Los Angeles.

It was started by a group of friends from Harvard who decided that theatre was not speaking to people and drove around the country in a van, visiting small towns.

They would stay for three months, devising theatre pieces that involved local people and dealt with their issues.

Then they moved to Los Angeles and realised they “were going to stay forever'', Kurup says, when they saw the number of communities they could work with.

Cornerstone has since engaged the breadth of humanity in this city, from Congolese Catholics to Latino day labourers to black Americans from poor neighbourhoods.

“It is important for any human being to see [himself/herself] up on stage instead of just going to see white people all the time,'' Kurup says.

“Because a lot of communities in these urban cultures have never been to a theatre.''

It seems that Kurup is, in his own way, giving to members of the community what he worked so hard to find. It must be a delicate balance, for, after all, the long, sometimes arduous search gave his life and character so much richness.

Gautam Raja is a US-based freelance writer.

Work for the screens, both big and small

‘Heroes': Kurup plays Nirand, a colleague of Chandra's and Mohinder's in Chennai. Incidentally, the Chennai scenes were shot in Zuma Beach, north of Malibu.

‘Lost': He plays Donovan in the episode ‘Flashes Before Your Eye'. Kurup enjoyed flying to Hawaii for the shoot but found it hard to wear a coat in the heat and pretend it was freezing cold in London.

‘City of Angels': A 1998 movie with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. Kurup talks about how interesting it was to watch the way people around the set were struck by Cage.

“You just see a hush come over the place when he's in. And before that we were working with Meg Ryan who's also a big star but it was collegial.

“I didn't even recognise him: ‘Who's that walking around in that big coat? Why is everybody so reverent with him?'''
‘NYPD Blue': “Was good. It was really hard, I had to cry, like, seven times.''

‘The West Wing': Kurup says that Alan Sorkin, creator of ‘The West Wing', wrote a reference to Arthur Miller's ‘The Crucible', into the episode ‘Bad Moon Rising' with Kurup in mind. “It was great to hear him say: ‘I wrote it for you. Go to town, be theatrical, enjoy it.'''

‘Coneheads': A 1993 movie based on the ‘Saturday Night Live' characters.

Kurup was playing a Sikh man and he tried to tell the producers that it wouldn't look right if he had a turban and no beard.

However, the shooting schedule was too tight for time to grow one, and a fake beard was expensive, so they went ahead with him in the turban, but clean-shaven. “So there I was, looking like Sabu the Jungle Boy.''