NEEM Magazine

It’s a Friday morning. I’ve been working on a heavy caseload all week. My office is strewn with mini mountains of official looking red welds. I am salivating at the thought of balmy freedom on a late April afternoon. I want to stroll about the east village with my friends, I want to sit in a park and read a book. I want to be anywhere but wrapped tightly in a navy blue skirt suit, suffocating in the heat with a choker of professional looking pearls strung tightly around my neck. One thought (and one can of red bull) keeps me going through the day, later that night, away from the confines of the legal world, I will be onstage.

Many years ago, as a college undergrad balancing very serious sounding courses like “conflict resolution in a post communist global community,” I took intro to acting. It was immediately addictive. I felt freedom in being able to express myself onstage. There was a tension release in being able to put away oneself for a few hours, and don the garb of another persona. Stepping into a character, and away from who you are, is a liberating feeling. Who hasn’t wondered what their life would be like if they could behave different, say something differently, behave without repercussions? For me, becoming another character felt this way. On stage, I wasn’t myself, I was Lady Macbeth, I was a Bosnian war crime victim, I was a newly arrived Indian immigrant, I was able to explore a range of emotion that I could never tap into in real life. I joined Arth Arts for the duration of my college life, and felt incredibly alive whenever rehearsing, or brainstorming with my troupe mates. But adulthood was calling, and as I transitioned into the “responsible” work of being a diligent law student, I put away my creativity, and stifled my passion for acting.

The famed Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib once said “ishq hai woh aatish ghalib, jo bhujaye na bhuje”, intense passion is a flame, which despite trying, cannot be extinguished. So it was with me and the pull of the stage. Eventually, returning to New York as an adult, I felt a certain spark missing, but could never put my finger on it. And that’s when I met Parwaz Playhouse.

Parwaz Playhouse is the first Pakistani Acting Troupe in New York City. We held our inaugural show “Glass” over Thanksgiving weekend of 2009 to nearly sold out audiences. Recently, on a balmy Friday afternoon in April, I traded my navy blue skirt suit and pearls for costume, and took the stage with my troupe mates to participate in the Downtown Urban Arts Festival, relishing in the honor of having our first piece “Glass” accepted for performance. And this time, we were completely sold out.

I still battle with the common misconceptions people hold of actors and actresses in the Desi community, they are narcissistic, they aren’t respectable, and they don’t come from good families. I don’t see myself as any of these things. In fact I don’t see anyone I’ve ever shared the stage with as any of these things. Once we step off the stage, we are completely normal. Some of us are full time actors, with the courage to strike out full time in search of fulfilling our passions, but many are like me, unwilling, or fearful to sacrifice stability for the thrill of devoting ourselves full time to the craft.

It strikes me as interesting, that my legal career garners more appreciation from the community, than something that is truly unique, the capability to captivate and entertain others. In my estimation, I am nothing but a textbook reader, lucky enough to have studied and made it through a few educational hoops and ended up on the other side of what is deemed a conventional career. What I admire, is the sheer veracity with which people are able to dedicate themselves wholly to the pursuit of one passion. Balancing a professional career replete with deadlines and important sounding jargon, with an acting career is a herculean task at times.

So how does balance work? Like all things in life, it’s about how high on your list of priorities you rank something. Your dedication to a cause, project or person, will outshine the limitations of your schedule, and the confines of a 24 hour day, every time. My weekends, especially before show time, are exclusively dedicated to Parwaz, meaning rehearsing in 8 hour blocks. Even though its very serious rehearsal time, it feels like an extended hang out with friends rather than working. There are of course times when work and acting butt heads. Deadlines and clients seldom care that you have to be somewhere else for a curtain call or to rehearse, and in times like those, unfortunately the craft takes second seat, but only for the time being.

Recently, someone remarked “I didn’t realize you were an actress, I thought you were a lawyer” and I smiled with the thought, that while groups like Parwaz Playhouse are making inroads in the theater community, we have a ways to go until our own Desi community realizes, we are not captive by stereotypes. We can be anything, and whoever we want to be, onstage, or off.

– Kiran Ali, Guest Columnist for NEEM Magazine