Yes, My Accent Is Real (17 page)

Cut to: junior year. The summer is over. Wounds have healed. Time for a new semester and a new play. The play was
The Rose Tattoo
, by Tennessee Williams. I had my eye on the role of Alvaro Mangiacavallo, an Italian truck driver. And
obviously
I'm Italian-looking.
^I
I memorized my lines and said them in the shower every morning. I read the play in its entirety twice, highlighting and scribbling notes, then wrote a long bio of the character. This was the first time as an actor that I was 100 percent prepared. And now, as a junior, I also had the benefit of additional acting classes. More important, though, I had a newfound appreciation of how hard I needed to work, and what it was really going to take to achieve my ultimate goal of getting the lead.

I lived and breathed Alvaro and thought about him from every angle. Let's take his physicality: He's a truck driver, right? That probably means he's sitting down a lot because he's driving the damn truck all the time, so when he gets up from a chair, he might have just the slightest amount of back pain. It's barely noticeable but it adds texture. (As compared to, say, my 117-year-old butler, who walked like Gandalf.) If this truck driver saw a beautiful woman,
what would his first reaction be? Maybe his first instinct is to cower, which would result in his overcompensating with an even more inflated show of bravado. How would he drink his water? I obsessed over how he gripped a pen, how long he held eye contact, how he would take a leak. I'd never worked this hard for
Cabaret
or
Ring Around the Moon
or badminton or my band or for anything, really.

“The part is yours,” the director told me right after the audition. There would be no waiting for the casting sheet. I was silently elated. For the first time in my life I thought,
Hey, maybe there actually
is
a future in this whole acting thing.

For the play I was supposed to have an Italian accent. But in real life, I actually have an Indian accent. And though I tried to master the Italian accent, onstage the two accents would sometimes blur, and I would go back and forth between Italian and Indian. But what I learned was that if you're completely committed to the character, it doesn't really matter if sometimes you botch an accent.
^II
The audience isn't thinking about what you look like or sound like. Truth is, if they can tell that
you
believe your character's journey with every cell of your being, they'll always be on your side.

And thankfully, they were on my side. Opening night treated us to thunderous applause, then the same with the second performance, then the third, and it became apparent that we would likely get nominated for ACTF again. Then I heard some buzz that I, personally, could get an acting nomination for ACTF.

Thursday night. Our fourth performance. Something happened during that performance that would change the course of my life. It
would be the one acting moment that ultimately led me to become the guy who's writing this book. There's a scene when my character, Alvaro, through various hijinks and follies, finds himself at a widow's house, and he explains to her (in an Italian/Indian accent, of course) that he had never felt silk on his skin.

The widow, Serafina, walks into the closet and pulls out a red shirt. She offers it to Alvaro.

Serafina: Nothing's too good for the man if the man is good.

Alvaro: The grandson of a village idiot is not that good.

Serafina: No matter whose grandson you are, put it on; you are welcome to wear it. [She gives him the shirt.]

This had always been one of my favorite scenes, but that night, for some reason, something was different. It felt like there was no audience; that no one was watching. As if the only two people that mattered in that moment were Alvaro and Serafina. When she handed me that shirt and I slipped it over my head, it felt like my entire body was melting into the silk. Like the way you snuggle back into a blanket on a cold Monday morning. I
felt
something. I felt
truth.
The shirt wasn't actually made of silk; it was a college play and budgets were small. But it could have been anything; in that moment it
was
silk, and I was wearing it for the very first time. As I sank into the shirt I released a sound from my mouth, like a silent
s
, a barely audible
ssssssssssss
. I had never made that sound in rehearsal or during the play. I don't know where it came from. I made that sound and the entire audience—at least in my mind's ears—all exhaled audibly, in unison. Just one collective deep breath.

And I began to cry. In that moment the character of Alvaro is not supposed to cry, but I was having an out-of-body experience. Tears flowed down my cheeks. I suppose someone might say that by crying I took the character out of the scene and did a disservice to the play, but I could tell—I could
feel
—that the audience was with me. Completely, utterly with me. And I wasn't crying because the character was feeling silk on his skin for the first time; I was crying because I finally got it. I was crying because I now understood that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was crying because I realized how much heartache it took to get here. And I was crying because I knew that I had the power to control the energy in the room.

After that performance I went home, and I replayed that moment in my mind, and I kept hearing over and over again,
ssssssssssss.
It made me realize the audience really
is
on my side. I had found something inside myself that made me
believe
. It was time to let go of the fear. Before I was my own worst enemy—the self-doubt, the insecurity—and now I could break free of those shackles. After that
ssssssssssss
I knew that something had changed.
I get it now. I'm in.

The next day I called my mom and dad.

“I'm not going to business school,” I told them. “I've decided I want to be an actor.”

“How are you going to pay your bills?” they could have said.

“It's a tough industry, this is a bad idea,” they could have said.

“We invested so much to get you over there, don't blow it,” they could have said.

“That's great. Proud of you!” they actually said.

I love them for that answer.

In the very next performance I tried to re-create the moment. The widow
gave me the red silk shirt, I slipped it on and said
ssssssssssss,
and waited for the magic. Nothing happened. No tears. No snuggling into a warm blanket on a cold Monday morning. Nothing. The night after that I tried again. Nothing. Every night I tried to feel the same magic. Nothing. It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Everything I needed to learn from that moment, I had learned. It showed me the path to my future. But now the moment had passed. I am not sure the audience could tell the difference; I felt that they were still with me every night during that scene. But for me, I couldn't re-create the same magic within. That happens in life, where a brief, fleeting moment can change us forever, and as hard as we try, it cannot be re-created. And just as hard as it is to re-create, it is harder yet to let it go. To this day, after all my acting endeavors, I have never been able to re-create what I felt that night. Maybe that is the dream I am really chasing. That and an Oscar.

The Rose Tattoo
did get nominated for ACTF, so we boarded a plane and returned to my old stomping grounds of Boise, Idaho. We were back in the same hotel, we performed on the same stage, and we were about to get adjudicated by the same crusty old gargoyles.

This year, though, things were different. I now had actual friends and no longer had to quarantine myself in my hotel room; in fact,
I
had the beers in my room and invited people to join me. I had graduated from Mike's Hard Lemonade to actual beer. I still remember how lonely I had felt as a freshman, so I threw hotel parties that brought everyone together—all my friends from Portland, even strangers from all the other theater programs. I finally felt like I belonged. That year was also different because I was nominated
individually as an actor, and I would be competing against actors from twenty-five different colleges. I had to perform a monologue against four hundred other competitors. Based on these monologues, the adjudicators would send two of us to Washington, D.C., for the nationals.

I performed the “Tangled Up in Blue” monologue from the play by Brad Boesen of the same name:

. . . You asked me why I never stayed very long with the women I've dated; it's you. Because of you. Because I didn't want to settle anymore. I've been doing it all my life, and I didn't want to settle. . . .

And every woman I met, every one, I would compare them to you, and they weren't you. They just weren't. And I refused to settle until . . . until I knew one way or another.

So don't tell me that I'm just drunk, or that I don't really feel the way I feel, because I've had four years to think about this, and I know how I feel.

It wasn't quite the
ssssssssssss
moment, but I still felt really good about my performance.

But what about those gargoyle adjudicators?

After all of us had finished our monologues, and after the applause faded and the crowd thinned from the auditorium, once again, as before, we changed out of our costumes and patiently awaited our judgment.

The doors to the auditorium opened. The judges entered. They looked just as I remembered: these ancient pillars of pretension, all of them bearded, all of them wearing suspenders. They looked like Santa Claus if the role of Santa Claus was being played by Satan. I
imagined that when they opened their mouths they would breathe fire. Were they the same judges as before? Maybe, I don't know—all white people look alike to me.
^III

“I have a question about your monologue's . . . realism,” I imagined the first judge saying, looking at his notes. “Would you really speak that way to a girl, COOONEL?”

Or maybe a judge would look at his notes, adjust his glasses, and say, “I know from your
words
that you were speaking to a girl, but for me, I couldn't
feel
that girl.”

Or perhaps a third would say, “Your Indian accent just wasn't believable.”

But what actually happened was this. One of the evil Santa Clauses looked at his notes, looked at me, pronounced my name correctly, and said, “Kunal, when you are able to make every person in the audience collectively release an audible
awwww
in unison, you've achieved something very special. Congratulations.”

I was headed to D.C. for nationals.

I
. Actually this really was an edge: I was probably the closest thing our school had to Sicilian.

II
. Some would disagree.

III
. This is not a joke. All white people really do look the same. To me.