Princeton South Asian Theatrics

"Dad, I want to major in drama."

"Drama?! What kind of major is drama? What kind of med school can you get into majoring in drama?"

These lines are from "Desis of Our Lives," the first student-written, student-directed production by a new on-campus "drama" group, Princeton South Asian Theatrics. "Desis" was performed at Princeton last spring and then on the road this fall. P-SAT also put on its new play, "Birds, Bees and Biodata," in the Forbes Black Box earlier this semester. We may not be majoring in drama, but theater, like a flesh-eating virus, has taken over our lives.

It all started innocently enough. Back in the fall of 1998, Karthick Ramakrishnan, a politics graduate student and Princeton's one-man progressive movement, announced that he wanted to do a 15-minute skit for the South Asian Students Association fall cultural show. Karthick and Sachin Shah, a sophomore with some playwriting experience, scribbled down a skeletal plot of two "typical" South Asian-American families, one rich and one poor, who send their respective son and daughter to Princeton.

A group of stray South Asian undergraduates showed up to play the parts. I got to play the girl's overbearing cardiologist father. To the initial skeleton, we added new lines, altered some parts and threw in a dance sequence. By the time we performed in January, the "skit" was 45 minutes long. In all, we had only one week to memorize the final version and rehearse. Our goal that night was to remember our lines and not screw up.

We did it, barely. The audience laughed at the one-liners, the physical humor, the overdone Indian accents. For the first time, people had staged scenes from their own twisted lives — a world of sambar at every meal, 11 p.m. curfews and a virtually Taliban-esque approach to gender relations. They loved it.

The post-performance euphoria went to our heads. Karthick brazenly declared what all of us were too modest to suggest: Why not write a second act, turn the "skit" into a full-length play and form a full-fledged theater group? Thus the nation's first campus South Asian theater group was born.

The name, P-SAT, doubles as an acronym for the infamous high school standardized test. Given our immigrant parents' obsessions with standardized exams, the double entendre seemed appropriate. For most of us, our prior acting experience was limited to performing silly skits in high school Spanish classes. We were not thespians. We were simply a gaggle of goofballs who had unwittingly stumbled upon a way to discuss common issues and have a good time doing it.

That spring, we wrote a second act, poking fun at everything from South Asian anti-Semitism to the futility of majoring in sociology. Last March, we performed the full-length play to two sold-out crowds in the Forbes Black Box. The mixed audiences, who didn't know sambar from samosas, responded well. For weeks thereafter, perfect strangers would accost cast members and repeat funny bits of dialogue. Like Will Smith, we discovered we had crossover appeal.

Most gratifying however, was the response from South Asians, both local families and Princeton students. South Asian immigrant parents want their kids to do well in life, preferably as Princeton undergraduates, Harvard Med-trained cardiologists settled in Westchester, N.Y., with subservient, samosa-cooking wives of the same sub-caste (chosen by their parents) and 2.3 kids who can all play sitar while dancing bharatnatyam and mastering multi-variable calculus. Needless to say, this causes some problems. For many, our play provided a springboard for confronting the generation gap.

During Fall Break this year, we took the gig on the road. Two van-fuls of South Asian over-achievers forsook cramming for their LSATs, GMATs and MCATs to tour New England with P-SAT. We performed at Karthick's alma mater in Wachusett, Mass., MIT, Brown, Penn and Rutgers, all the while flying by the seat of our pants.

P-SAT, as the noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said of India, is a functioning anarchy. In true Indian tradition the group is highly democratic. Techies play bit parts. Lead actors double as prop managers. The University requires all groups to have hierarchical officer corps. To avoid utter disarray, the buck usually stops with Sachin (who does much of the work that keeps the ship afloat). But everything from the writing to the directing is still done largely as a collaborative, chaotic effort. I love it.

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Anarchy comes with a price, though: We must be the only theater group to have gone a whole year without thinking of having a stage manager. For one thing, minor logistical affairs like scene changes took us an eternity.

Demanding excellence while preserving the democratic chaos is a fine line to straddle. P-SAT is at its best when it is that functioning anarchy, when the creative vat bubbles with ideas and dissent from all corners and produces something spicy and savory. This spring, we have several new cast members, and a new play, "Birds, Bees and Biodata." The group is a bit more structured; the themes remain eternal.

At P-SAT's core, it's not about the theater. Technical prowess is not our forte. It probably never will be. Fundamentally, we're just a bunch of people who like being around each other. Through shared humor — of cheapskate fathers, doting mothers and gossipy aunties — we've accomplished something unique: We've formed the germ for a sense of community among South Asian students on this campus. Sachin, who hails from Michigan, hopes to spread that germ further by taking the new show to the heartland next fall. I wish the group luck. Play on P-SAT. The med school applications can wait.

Kushanava Choudhury, who graduated with a degree in politics, is from Highland Park, N.J.