Vijai Nathan in Ithaca

Arts feature:
profiling Indian-American comedienne and theatre performer Vijai Nathan
Ithaca Times
September 26, 2007
1,271 words

"Upstaging Tradition"

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Upstaging Tradition
By: Mark Tedeschi
09/26/2007

"With stand-up, each person is pretty different," says Vijai Nathan. "The guys I've worked with? One is like an Indian 'gangsta,' so that's his act. Another one is gay - he grew up in India but lives in America, so he has a totally different point of view."

Nathan, 35, also has a unique point of view. An Indian-American comedienne - performing at the Kitchen Theatre this weekend - she has spent the last 10 years using stand-up comedy and theatre performance to share her distinctive perspective with audiences around the world.

Nathan's parents moved from India to the United States in the early 1970s. She was the first of her siblings born in America, and in school, found herself looked at by her classmates as different. "There were a couple of Korean kids, me... and that's it," she says.

The culture clash she experienced growing up was a struggle for Nathan until she gave it a new outlet: comedy. But her original career path was hardly headed in that direction. "I had a degree in English literature, and then a job in copy editing." For an English major just out of college, she explains, "It was either Starbucks or journalism."

"I did [journalism] for three years," she continues. It was a good job, and I was making good money. I just started realizing it wasn't the right fit for me."

Nathan looked into adult education classes wherein, she jokes, "In two sessions you can become a wine taster or a professional comedian."

Comedy, Nathan discovered, was exactly what she'd been looking for. Initially, her parents responded to the news of her new interest with some skepticism; they thought she must be unhappy with her life. Then they watched her perform. "They saw that people were laughing, and realized, 'She must be doing something right!'" After that, they encouraged her, "If you're going to do this, be the best you can at it."

In 1997, she quit the journalism job and toured around Maryland. After an unfortunate car accident totaled her only means of transportation from venue to venue, she was forced to move to Manhattan ("An accident brought me to New York - literally"). There, she took a job as a receptionist to earn money while she performed in the city's comedy circuit. The receptionist job kept her from performing as much as she would have liked, but that wasn't the worst part. "The worst part was having to ask permission to pee," she says. It didn't last too long - since 2003, Nathan has been able to make a living strictly from writing and performing.

When she discovered that her stand-up material was touching on themes deeper than simple on-the-surface comedy, Nathan expanded her act to include a one-woman theater piece titled, "Good Girls Don't, But Indian Girls Do." For her upcoming performance at the Kitchen, she'll start with some stand-up, follow with the "Good Girls Don't" show, and conclude with time for audience questions.

She says that "Good Girls Don't" has a different energy than stand-up, her first love. "The main point is to be funny, to use the aggressive energy of stand-up. With the solo show, I can be more vulnerable and write some of the back story that's behind the jokes. I can give the full picture, the full range of emotion."

That back story was even enough for her to try turning the show into a screenplay. "I started writing the first draft," she says. "I got through act one. The second was harder...and on the third act, I quit." The prospect of waiting for the pleasure of hearing a crowd's reaction frustrated her. "I love writing a performance for an audience. The hardest part about writing a film or novel is that you don't get to perform it - you have to wait for someone else to work on it."

Nathan covers a breadth of topics in her act: growing up amidst cultural misunderstandings, having two "very Indian" immigrant parents, living in two worlds at once. "And there are other things that happen to anyone in America," she adds. "Dating and relationships, TV... it's a coming-of-age story."

Since "Good Girls Don't" follows a script complete with music and lighting cues, there isn't as much room for improvisation as the stand-up routine sometimes calls for. Nathan has to be ready to adjust to a particular audience's reactions, but she's only had one real instance of "heckling" in her comedy career - but she admits the guilty party had good reason.

"All the things converged in the wrong way," she remembers. Her friend was performing at a show called "The Nasty Girls of Comedy" and ordered Nathan up to the stage. "I wasn't ready - I was still in my hideous receptionist clothes. My material was not 'Nasty Girl' material, so my friend said, 'Just change your stuff to be nasty.' I'd do things like tell a joke and add an extra curse... I was obviously uncomfortable."

Nathan, still relatively new to performance, prayed for the "red light" to come on, indicating she could leave the stage. "Back then, I didn't realize that you should just leave. I still have the audio tape - you want to keep things like that around. I think I labeled it 'The Day I Completely Bombed.'"

Nathan has also performed abroad in South Africa, England and several cities in Canada (a country she calls "The Other White Meat"). She ran into some unexpected cultural differences during her visit to South Africa; at one comedy festival, there were two stages - one standard theatrical venue, and one called "The Danger Zone."

"Comics booked to that [latter] room would usually get naked at some point in their act," she says. "Many Indians in South Africa are conservative, or some are Muslim. They saw a woman who looks Indian, speaking with an American accent, talking about sex and dating... after two days, I got switched to the Danger Zone. It was like an Indian woman talking about premarital sex was as offensive as a guy showing his balls."

Although she hasn't performed in India, she doesn't expect the reaction there would be any less harsh. "I think they'd kill me," she says in jest. "An Indian guy could talk about sex or politics, but with a woman it's another level of whether it's okay to laugh." She adds, "So much of [my act] is about language, and English is a second language for most there."

Nathan has visited India, though, and plans to return there soon to gather material for a new show - in fact, her performance in Ithaca is the last before she takes some down time to write more.

What's the new show about? "I think... it's going to be about God," she says. "Maybe. It's still kind of a big mess of mushy soup in my head." Religion was a dynamic element in her upbringing, rife with ponderable implications. "My mother is Hindu and also very superstitious. My Dad was agnostic or atheist, depending on his mood. And my oldest sister is a born-again Christian."

In the meantime, she may also produce more short, cheap video sketches like "Chai Noon" (easily found via a Google video search), which stars both of her parents. "It was fun! A kind of instant gratification," she says.

Her parents have always loved being a part of her act. "They feel famous!" she says proudly. "My father passed away in April of this year. People were so sad when they found out. He affected all these other people's lives just because they'd seen my show. It's nice - makes it seem like he's always around."

Nathan's website is www.vijaicomedy.com. For more information on the Kitchen Theatre's Counter Culture series, visit www.kitchentheatre.org/kcc. The Kitchen Theatre is located on 116 N. Cayuga St.

Billy Taylor in Ithaca

Arts feature:
profiling jazz pianist and educator Billy Taylor
Ithaca Times
September 12, 2007
774 words

"Playing Strong"

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Playing strong
By: Mark Tedeschi
09/12/2007

"I'm retired now," jazz pianist and educator Billy Taylor says. "I used to tour 50 weeks a year. I'm taking it easy. I still travel, but not as much."

He's earned a breather; after 350 original songs, 23 honorary doctoral degrees, two Peabody awards, an Emmy, a Grammy, and an appointment to the National Council of the Arts, any musician would be eager to settle down.

Relative to the busy schedule he's had for much of his life, Taylor has slowed - but his activity in the world of music performance and education is far from complete. He teaches in the summer at the University of Massachusetts, writes original compositions, and, on a regular basis, lectures and performs all around the country. Not bad for an 86-year-old.

This weekend, Taylor will be visiting the Whalen Center at Ithaca College for two nights: On Friday at 4:30pm in the Hockett Family Recital Hall, he'll coach Ithaca College student jazz ensembles; on Saturday at 8:15pm in Ford Hall, he'll host "An Evening With Dr. Billy Taylor," which will include a demonstration, a lecture, and a solo performance. Both shows are free and open to the public.

Taylor has been the Artistic Advisor for Jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the past 13 years, and he says there are actually many performers out there who are around his age. "We had quite a few of them as guests for special presentations last spring, and I'm so proud," he says. "Some people don't get the kind of attention they should."

With a professional career spanning over 60 years, Taylor knows he's been very fortunate to have worked with so many significant figures in jazz history. He produces a few names as if pulling them out of a hat, while granting them equal respect: Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus. In the 1980s, Taylor was the arts correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, where on every show he used to have "at least four or five interviews with people who were into different kinds of jazz."

Though he thinks as a whole "we decided as a country to put [jazz] on the side," Taylor remains optimistic. "People come from other places because they recognize the quality of the music, and they play it with their own unique accents." The variety of contemporary jazz encourages Taylor to continue educating people. "So many don't realize that jazz is America's classical music. It speaks very eloquently about freedom." Musicians visit the U.S. from all over the world, he says, because they heard a form of music they wanted to get closer to.

Technology has afforded the world an even greater opportunity for that kind of exposure. Just look at Taylor's website, www.billytaylorjazz.com, which is filled with videos, audio clips, interviews, biographies, and a wealth of other information. "It could get expensive to go through the process of having to buy a record or see a performer live," he says. "[This kind of] technology allows it more easily."

Two of the Kennedy Center events that Taylor is especially proud of are the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, a showcase of "the world's most acclaimed female jazz artists," and Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead, a residency program for young people who want to study jazz performance and composition. Taylor's enthusiasm for these annual programs indicates his everlasting drive to edify as many people as possible on the dynamic potential of jazz music.

Taylor's appearance this weekend is part of Ithaca College's Enduring Masters series, a collaboration between the School of Music and the Gerentology Institute. "I'm delighted [Ithaca] is doing things like that," he says of the series. "The media now is so pop-oriented and hip-oriented. Look at the TV show American Idol. [Some of my students] can sing better than those contestants. It's ridiculous that [the producers] have made such an arbitrary decision of what we're supposed to listen to. It gives people the wrong idea of what American music is about."

He has performed in Ithaca before: "We used to bring the jazzmobile out there...it was always fun," he says. Taylor applauds the city's offering of exciting music that, he says, doesn't garner as much attention as it should. "One of the reasons I do this kind of [Enduring Masters] concert is that you can hear so much more from a live performance than you would from a record or on television," he says. "To be in the same room with someone and see what they do is a dimension that too often is missing in music."

More information on the Enduring Masters series is available at www.ithaca.edu/enduringmasters.

Ithaca Fall Theatre Preview

Preview story:
Theatre in Ithaca, Fall 2007
Ithaca Times
September 5, 2007
749 words

"Fall Theatre Preview"

full text here

Fall Theatre Preview
By: Mark Tedeschi
09/05/2007

This fall, local theatre venues offer a fascinating and delectable array of productions that promise to rouse conversation, stimulate intellect, and tickle funny bones.

Cornell University kicks off its fall season with Good (Sept. 13-15, 20-22) by C.P. Taylor, a challenging drama about a "good" man seduced into the Nazi regime; his torment is enhanced by evocative music. After that, Cornell will lighten things up with two classic comedies: The first is Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce (Oct. 17-21, 24-28) (a treat for anyone who enjoyed Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves at Cortland Rep. this summer); it follows a self-absorbed couple's havoc-wreaking attempts to salvage their failing marriage. The second, The Bourgeois Gentleman (Nov. 15-17, 29-Dec. 2), is a Molière comedy-ballet about an ill-mannered man who tries to buy his peers' esteem and respect by altering his appearance and demeanor.

Closing the theatre season is Slow Dusk (Nov. 9-11), former Syracuse University student Carlisle Floyd's Depression-era one-act opera about guilt and religious fanaticism. Other performances this fall include the free RPTA Showcase (Sept. 2) featuring the Schwartz Center's six Equity actors (including J.G. Hertzler of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine") from the Resident Professional Teaching Associates program, and Cornell Dance Series' Garth Fagan Dance (Sept. 27), a performance of Afro-Caribbean energy choreographed by a Tony Award winner. For Cornell Theatre information and tickets, call 254-ARTS.

The first two productions at Ithaca College take polar approaches to exploring gender roles: Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler (Oct. 2, 4-7) is a stark, personal drama about the iconic title character's struggle with the weighty choices she faces as a woman with traditional 19th century responsibilities; The Full Monty (Oct. 30, Nov. 1, 3-4, 7, 9-10) - music and lyrics by David Yazbek, based on Peter Cattaneo's film/Terrence McNally's book - situates women as family breadwinners and men as aspiring strippers. This racy comedy-musical is for mature audiences only.

Alfred Uhry's Tony Award-winning The Last Night of Ballyhoo (Dec. 4, 6-9) follows the trend of societal investigation with a story about a Jewish family living in 1939 Atlanta who obsess about an important upcoming social event, the premiere of Gone with the Wind, and an observantly Jewish dinner guest from Brooklyn. The play pushes its audience to contemplate intolerance at the same time as it encourages laughter. For Ithaca College Theatre information and tickets, call 274-3224.

Now in its 17th season, the Kitchen Theatre Company, located in the Clinton House at 116 N. Cayuga St., offers a plethora of regional and world premieres. The Main Stage Series begins with Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House (Aug. 30-Sept. 23), a Pulitzer Prize finalist about "the tidy, unemotional life of a doctor, her adulterous husband, her sister, and her Brazilian housekeeper, who aspires to tell the funniest joke in the world." Following that is a play by Brian Dykstra, author of Clean Alternatives (a regional premiere at the Kitchen last year) called STRANGERHORSE (Oct. 18-Nov. 11), a drama about ethics and racism that features Dykstra's snappy, humorous dialogue. In December, Iraqi-American Heather Raffo's critically acclaimed solo-performance show 9 Parts of Desire (Dec. 6-23) examines the strenuous lives of nine women living in Iraq.

The Kitchen's Counter-Culture series continues last year's focus on artists of color with five groundbreaking, rulebreaking solo performances. This fall features Vijai Nathan's Good Girls Don't, But Indian Girls Do (Sept. 28-30) and Darian Dauchan's Media Madness (Nov. 16-18).

Parents can take their kids to the always-enjoyable "Family Fare" series at the Kitchen, too. Acrobat/juggler Nicholas Flair performs his one-man show, The Other Side, on Sept. 29 and 30. The Adventure in Apartment G Sharp by Rachel Lampert and Nathan Hilgartner, featuring "music from the grandest of Operas," runs Oct. 27-Nov. 11. And the Kitchen Sink's Teen Extreme Playwriting Contest and Marathon! will feature young playwrights' talent from the local area. For Kitchen Theatre information and tickets, call 273-4497.

Finally, the Syracuse Stage at 820 E. Genesee St. in Syracuse opens its season with two literary adaptations of different sorts. First up is Christopher Hampton's Les Liasons Dangereuses (Sept. 26-Oct. 14), a sexually charged story about manipulation and the aristocracy based on a 1782 French novel by Pierre Choderlos. Following that, just in time for Halloween, is Simon Moore's adaptation of Misery (Oct. 24-Nov. 11), a nail-biting Stephen King suspense novel about a fictional famous author's torturous kidnapping by his biggest fan.

"The Clean House"

Theatre review
"The Clean House" at the Kitchen Theatre
Ithaca Times
September 5, 2007
715 words

"The Divine Comedy"

full text here

The Divine Comedy
By: Mark Tedeschi
09/05/2007

The Clean House, by Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Sara Lampert Hoover. With Ursula Cataan, Leigh Keeley, Olivia Lawrence, Charles Stransky and Addie Walsh. At the Kitchen Theatre through Sept. 23.



We rarely realize that a well-told joke extracts more laughs from timing (or its "time signature") and style of delivery than from straight content. When a woman opens a play with a joke in Portuguese in front of the projected words "a woman tells a joke in Portuguese," it's clear that although an audience might not understand it literally, their response indicates they can recognize and appreciate a hilarious joke when they hear one. The universality of humor is as encompassing as that of love, and Sarah Ruhl's The Clean House succeeds in illustrating both.

The Kitchen Theatre opens its 17th season with the Pulitzer-nominated comedy The Clean House, here directed by Sara Lampert Hoover, a complex but enjoyable example of the passionate work that the Kitchen consistently shares.

Lane (Walsh), a doctor who dislikes giving orders and hates laughing out loud, has a prim demeanor that fully fits the set design of her immaculate, all-white living room. She hires Mathilde (Cataan), the Brazilian jokester who considers humor as crucial to life as oxygen, to keep the place clean.

The problem? Mathilde hates cleaning; it makes her sad and uninspired. The solution? Lane's sister, Virginia (Keeley), an unemployed lady with a housecleaning regimen so familiar that she can spend her spare time secretly cleaning Lane's house for Mathilde while the two of them "talk and fold laundry, as women used to do."

Lane has a husband named Charles (Stansky), also a doctor, who remains unseen (though Stansky does appear earlier in flashbacks playing Mathilde's father opposite Lawrence as her mother) until it's revealed that he's having an affair with his 67-year-old breast cancer patient, Ana (Lawrence).

Ana's moxie counterbalances Lane's inflexibility, and Charles has no apologies about being forthright with his feelings. He even brings Ana into their home in order to introduce his wife to his mistress and uses the Jewish concept of a basherte (soul mate) to justify the "metaphysically objective" choice he made - even though he's not Jewish. Fortunately, the ensuing conversations avoid painful awkwardness - they're just plain funny.

The writing and acting cooperate to create layered characters. They evolve, and so does the set - you'll be surprised at how much a few furniture rearrangements and half-eaten apples can change one's perception.

Mathilde finds a muse in Ana, and decides to split her time evenly between Ana's and Lane's houses. When she's not apple-picking with Ana or pretending to clean for Lane, Mathilde is trying to come up with "The Perfect Joke," an elusive creation with the power to make someone die laughing and an equilibrium of purity and scatology that, she says, puts it "somewhere between an angel and a fart."

The structure of The Clean House follows no conventions, but still stays coherent. We move briskly from a peaceful seashore to an Alaskan snowstorm and back, helped along by swift lighting and sound design changes. Boel's original score also moves us through time and space with rich music that, as a whole, transcends genre.

Characters' initial introductions are set aside from the story with excellent monologues and mini-stories giving clues to their backgrounds and their attitudes about life.

Eventually, they confront and challenge those attitudes; Mathilde is asked to actually tell the world's funniest joke, Lane accepts that she needs (even likes!) help from others, and Virginia revels in making a complete mess. Ana looks like a totally different person by the end of the loopy second act, and her transformation has little to do with makeup.

The acting gives credibility to the changes and helps underscore the thematic underbelly: Life is a conglomerate holding immeasurable amounts of love and death, laughter and sadness, transition and confusion. Lane chuckles at a joke, then cries, then laughs, then sobs.

The four women characters represent different schools of emotional approaches to life. Mathilde sees humor as perhaps the purest of the emotions, or at least the most worthy of attention. She wears black because she's in mourning but always thinks fondly of her parents' life together, imagining them laughing through good times and bad.

The perceived humor in the opening joke demonstrates Ruhl's command of all-embracing storytelling and sophisticated language. Only a skilled team can execute such a production, and in its opening show this year, the Kitchen has done well.