Theatre Review: Sakina’s Restaurant Redefines Opportunity At Minetta Lane

SYNOPSIS: Sakina’s Restaurant is about a family of Indian Muslims who own the restaurant and a new immigrant who arrives from India to work as a waiter. The script revolves around the household of Hakim and Farrida, a couple who made the trek from India primarily for a better standard of living and now run the titular establishment in New York. Their children have more fully imbibed the new culture than they have, and they aren’t happy about it. Their teenage daughter, Sakina, is wavering between a boyfriend who isn’t even sure if she’s Indian or Iranian and a fellow Indian immigrant, who was picked for her by her parents. We hear her side of a confrontation with the clueless U.S. boyfriend, who challenged her to tear up a photo of his rival. Her reaction to that challenge is a crackling dramatic moment.

There once was a boy with a stone, of which he thought that, if he threw the stone in the river, it would become a diamond. The boy threw the stone, and watched as the river whirled and whisked its away. The boy ran after it, but it fell upon a bed of thousands of stones. As he looked to find it, picking out one stone after the other, he realized, he didn’t know what it looked like. 

This is a summation of Aasif Mandvi’s final adage for his Obie Award winning play, Sakina’s Restaurant, and it was the most impactful because it summed up a recurring question throughout Mandvi’s characters’ lives: how do we define opportunity? By far, an immigrant’s tale, Mandvi highlights the personal, communal, and societal discrepancies in how we see our fortune and prosperity. With so many people leaving their home countries or altering their desires/ dreams for “opportunity,” in perspective, we rarely define what this word means or looks like to us.

Mandvi plays multiple characters that are all interconnected by one, sole sentiment: confusion. In the 90 minute, one man show, he transforms by body and voice. A scarf here or a blazer there, symbolizes a change in persona, but it is how Mandvi, literally, alters his spirit that places you in awe. He becomes the dancing Farrida, whose life in India was filled with daily excursions and adventures, but, in America, she is alone, taking care of her daughter, Sakina, her husband, Hakim, and their restaurant, i.e. Sakina’s Restaurant. By the end of her monologue, she, and the audience, are crying because she wonders: why even dance anymore? 

From Azgi’s inability to fully embrace the little rewards of his labor to Sakina’s emotional tear at never fully fitting into American life, despite being a native citizen, every character struggles with feeling out of place. Yet, Mandvi’s writing, Kimberly Senior’s cozy direction, and Wilson Chin’s vivid, scene design, the show is brilliant in making you feel the characters’ dividing  identities   between societal and spiritual. They have no clear idea where their social standing truly lies: they are immigrants, immigrants’ children, successful, failed, and, altogether, lost. Each one carries a sadness that leaves them blocked from fully embracing America and their current life in it because they are gnawed by a feeling that they got “duped.” “Opportunity” is not what it seems, and it is because of both racism, and how  they turned this elusive term they had to get but had not concrete definition; as seen by Ali’s hilarious and heartbreaking emotional breakdown over his sexual attraction to a white woman/ prostitute and his medical exam. 

Mandvi does display the racial and social prejudice certain characters endure like, Hakim’s warning to his daughter Sakina that she will be Indian the minute she tries to date a white man to her own realization of this sad forewarning. These instances work to further crush the lining of characters he portrays because they add onto to their natural/ universal difficulties in trying to figure out their lives. For Mandvi, social labels and constructs are unnecessary barriers to a more important and difficult discovery: who we are as beating, dreaming hearts. Whether it be Samir’s desire to keep his Gameboy and not give it to his “stupid cousin” or Sakina’s desire to remain in a rock band, even after her arranged marriage, Mandvi’s creates fully fleshed characters with expanding material and soulful needs that feel trapped. They do not know who to be beyond what their culture, both American and Indian, tells them to be; the problem is that each culture has its own discriminations.

Both Farrida and Sakina stood out to me as characters because they were women, and, no matter what, they could not avoid following/falling into the plots of surrounding men. They added a nuance to Mandvi’s, predominantly, male characters. While they struggled to provide and honor their family, these ladies suffered because, systemically, they could not provide for or honor themselves. In essence, they brought a “damn if you do or damn if you don’t” mentality to Sakina’s Restaurant; showing that whether others decide for you or you decide for yourself, pain and self-ambiguity are unavoidable, but systems, either cultural or societal, amplify such hardships. 

In India, Sakina and family are a history, traditions, food, and their massive family. Yet, here, they are simply trying to summon and maintain the memory of such things, despite, being alienated from both America and India. I know that a community goes beyond a territory, but Sakina’s Restaurant beautifully and hilariously observes what happens to individuals when they feel they do not have a land to call their own. This wise, impactful observation sneaks up on you in-between physical comedy and brief, moral myths. No matter what, Aasif Mandvi magically uses his time, presence, and the stage as evidence that his talent goes beyond smart laughs; it weaves tales with enlightening, human commentary. Sakina’s Restaurant runs until November 11 at Minetta Lane Theatre. Located: Minetta Lane Theatre 18 Minetta Lane between MacDougal & 6th Ave. one block south of W.3rd  Click Here To Buy Tickets.