A Random Ass Trip
No disrespect to the city of Atlanta, which is really awesome and has many people I love
I just got back from a trip to Atlanta that I thought was pretty random and unnecessary. I feel bad for categorizing it that way, because I’m usually really about radically accepting a situation and finding the beneficial frame. I can’t see the point in characterizing any of life’s experiences as random or pointless, because why not find a way to usefully integrate an experience or memory if it’s going to lodge itself in your life anyway. However, I learned this week that not every event in life is part of its gorgeous decor; some experiences, I guess, have to make up the asphalt and scaffolding.
The main reason for my travel was a work conference, mainly centered around “data driven decision-making in non-profit marketing.” The morning of the first day of the conference, journaling in my hotel room to pull myself out of the inevitable funk that imbues any sane person about to go to a conference about data driven decision-making in non-profit marketing, I wrote down the phrase, “I challenge myself to be inspired today.”
Like any good challenge, it proved to be challenging. If I felt inspired, it was mostly towards critique of the non-profit space which purports to be different from the traditional corporation, yet is as singularly focused on the drumming up of revenue, treats its leadership with as much paternalistic reverence, and is just as top-heavy when it comes to the distribution of salary. Marketing focused on continuing these aims is not inspiring to me. It may not be career-smart to blast these thoughts to a public newsletter, but I am much more honest than I am intelligent. Also I had to sell tickets to see Anderson .Paak at the Hollywood Bowl when this trip got put on my calendar, and my friends were very honest about how much I missed out on.
The one upside to the trip was that I came to Georgia a few days early, and got to hang out with my family. The time we spent together felt really reminiscent of high school, as I spent a lot of it memorizing lines for the play I’m in right now, called “Animals Out of Paper” by Rajiv Joseph.
The play is in two weeks, and I’m a little nervous about it, hence why I was bummed about missing a week of rehearsals for this trip. Being both an actor and producer of this play, this situation is not something I would ask for. After all, I’m the one who asked my friends to do this play with me.
This production came to be when I was hanging out at my local coffee shop, reading a collection of plays by Rajiv Joseph. I’ve been a fan of his for a while, having used monologues from “Guards at the Taj,” for auditions since the beginning of college. When I started “Animals,” I was really compelled by the writing. I vastly preferred it to the play that immediately preceded it in the collection of Joseph’s work, “Gruesome Playground Injuries.” In comparison, Animals Out of Paper has a much more traditional narrative. It’s a three-person play following three origamists: Ilana, Andy, and Suresh, who arrive in each others’ lives and permanently change one another.
Ilana Andrews is an origami expert, famous amongst origami-heads and author of the book “Folding The Things I’ve Lost,” a collection of essays and origami projects. Andy Froling is a high school math teacher, Treasurer of the magazine “American Origami,” and a big fan of Ilana’s. He visits her apartment under the pretense of meeting his origami hero, but also to ask her for a favor: to tutor his student Suresh in origami. Suresh is an 18-year old origami prodigy, who’s recently pulled away from his studies and communities after his mother was killed in a hit-and-run accident.
Obviously, to me and probably the other Indian people reading this, I play Suresh in this production. I read the play and immediately gravitated to the language. As I mentioned, it’s a really traditional narrative, especially compared to Gruesome Playground Injuries, which is an absurd, nonlinear, darkly comic play, or Guards at the Taj, which is a similarly dark historical fiction. In Animals Out of Paper, Joseph hands you really obvious metaphors and imagery to play with. A big part of the play, from the point of view of my character, focuses on Suresh folding an anatomically accurate origami heart. When I read it for the first time, I was immediately drawn to the simplicity, and the direct nature of its writing. The characters, generally, tell each other exactly what they mean and how they feel.
The play provides great material for actors, and before I had even finished reading it, I sent the play to a few of my friends who I thought would be good for the parts, as well as one who I thought could direct it really well. In just under two weeks, we will be putting it up.
Getting adults together to put on a play is so much harder than doing one in college. Everyone wears several hats, as we are all hyphenated producers. Creating spreadsheets to source costumes and props, invoking vague memories of those I had seen during college, I had a thought that feels evergreen: “you can learn so much from doing something once.”
While back in Atlanta, I got to hang out with my 14 year old cousin, who just started his freshman year of high school. I mentioned him in my last newsletter, the kid who I watched grow up for the first half of his life. I went to college when he started his tween years, and never had the clearest sense about how those years were going for him. As a pre-teen boy, he wasn’t necessarily forthcoming with or even able to articulate much of what he was experiencing. Unlike me, I don’t think he was blogging all his thoughts on tumblr.com. At 14 though, he seems to be finding more words.
He’s currently a percussionist in his high-school marching band and drumline, and apparently that’s been really good for him. I decided to rip the bandaid of formally acknowledging his developing sense of self, and suggested that we follow each other on Instagram. We did that, and his single-digit number of posts have showed me that band has given him a community.
He told me that middle school was hard for him. He didn’t feel like he had a strong sense of motivation, or passion for life– which I told him is a totally normal, even quintessential way to go through middle school, and not at all a personal failing. Nevertheless, discovering his love for music seems to have solved a lot of his problems. His passion for band, he reports, has given him a sense of direction in life that he was craving, and has quelled his existentialism. Things have been less confusing, his teenage years less daunting, since he found an area of specific focus.
I think it’s so nuts how relatable I found him to be. How the antidote he had found to guide his transition into his teenage years was exactly what I have fallen back on in my adult life as well. Theatre has guided me through my entire young life.
In our conversation, I thought about stealing hours away from the conference to retreat to my hotel room and learn my lines for the play. I thought about how last year, I was doing the exact same thing at this annual meeting during the last week of rehearsals for Concessions, the Play. I’m reminded how last year, and this year, producing a play allowed me to con my dear friends into spending hours upon hours of uninterrupted time together. Time and work that has given me some of the deepest relationships I have in the city where I have begun my adult life.
Time spent with my 14 year old cousin also makes me think about Suresh, the young kid who I have the challenge of developing a deeply intertwined connection to over the next two weeks. He’s 18 years old, caught right between the age I am now, and that of my cousin. Like Theatre for me, or music for my cousin, origami provides this kid respite amidst an existential distress. The relationships he forms with the other characters on stage forever change his life, and thus have changed mine as well.
And just like that, my trip feels much less random.
So glad I found your Substack. You're such a great writer Rishi :)