Zaraawar Mistry is a co-founder and the Artistic and Managing Director of the Center for Independent Artists in Minneapolis. As an actor he has performed at the La Jolla Playhouse, and as a company member with the Guthrie Theater, Mixed Blood Theater and at the Children's Theater Company. He has worked extensively with Ragamala Music and Dance Theater as an actor, writer and director, including creating a critically acclaimed adaptation of The Transposed Heads.

From 1996-99 he was the Associate Artistic Director at Theater Mu in Minneapolis, where he directed several original works. He has received numerous grants in support of his work, notably from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Playwright's Center and Intermedia Arts.

Mr Mistry will be presenting his production of Sohrab and Rustum at the Asia Society on November 7 and 8, 2003.

Can you give me some sense of your previous experience and how you came to be interested in theatre and the performing arts?

I have been acting since I was a child. When I was a teenager, and had just finished high school, I, like all good Indian boys, went into computer science and engineering. At the same time I started doing amateur theatricals with the Dramatic Centre of Hyderabad (DCH) in India. A year and a half into my computer science studies, I gave my mother a heart attack when I told her I was quitting and I was going to be an actor. But eventually I cut a deal with her. I told her I would go to Bombay for a couple of years and would work on becoming a professional actor, and in the mean time would also apply for admission into a college in the US. I told her that if I were to get admission and a scholarship, then I would continue my studies in theatre, but if not, I would return to engineering school. To be honest, I did not think that would ever happen, but I had to cut a deal!

So I have loved theater all my life. I came here to Bennington College in Vermont and studied theater. Then I went to graduate school at the University of California (San Diego), received a Master's in theater, and then got a job with the Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis, which was just awarded a Tony for their contribution to children's theater. They are the premiere children's theater company in the country.

From there, I got a job at the Guthrie Theater which is one of the finest regional theaters in the US. I thought at the time that I had really gotten where I wanted to get. But in all that time I came to discover that this is not what I wanted; I did not like what I was doing. I felt like I was punching the clock, I was a contracted actor, I did not feel like an artist; in short, I had no outlet for my creative energy.

I also felt, as a person of color in the United States, particularly in Minnesota - but even here in New York the problems are quite similar - I would encounter numerous constraints as an actor. The opportunities are limited, the roles are boring or type-cast, so you need to carve your own world. I got tired of being seen the way people expected me to be seen.

I also became interested at the same time in writing and directing. I felt that acting - especially in the context I was working in - was almost pointless. I decided to start doing work that was more personal (personally meaningful, that is, not necessarily personal in the sense of being about me). I wanted my work to be more culturally and thematically relevant to my experience. Even if the actual work was not relevant in this way, I wanted very much that the context should be.

So I joined a small Asian-American theater company in Minnesota called Theater Mu. I started writing and directing and working with other Asians. There were no Indians, really, mostly East and Southeast Asians (Koreans, Japanese, Filipino, and so on). I had a grand time there; I really loved it. I did a lot of different kinds of work there. Eventually I decided that even this was not quite satisfying.

I stepped out on my own and started an arts organization called Center for Independent Artists, which is a multicultural organization that nurtures independent artistic vision by providing resources to artists. These resources include space, equipment, marketing support, grant-writing support, so artists can work on projects in a way that makes sense to them. So the organization basically provides all the things I had really wanted for myself when I had started out!

So now I just have a few projects that I work on occasionally, and at other times, I am facilitating for others, both of which I enjoy very much.

What different traditions have influenced the kind of work you do, both in terms of form and content?

From a theatrical perspective, I grew up studying Western theater. Indian theater was Indian theater and Western theater was everything that we aspired to! Of course as soon as I came to the US for college, I wanted to know everything about Indian cultural traditions.

I have studied a lot of classical Western theater and everything that comes with that. In addition, I have studied quite a bit of Bharat Natyam. There is a South Indian dance company in Minneapolis called Ragamala Music and Dance Theater. I have done quite a lot of work with them over the last few years. Our most recent project was an adaptation of The Transposed Heads by Thomas Mann. We had a Bharat Natyam dancer and a deaf actress, both using their own sign language: the Bharat Natyam used the abhinaya and the other performer used American Sign Language (ASL). The whole performance was done through gesture and verbal storytelling, so it was more like a theater piece but with dance and movement and music and so on.

While at graduate school, I also studied a Japanese form - Suzuki-training - for three years. Suzuki is very physical-movement based training with this teacher by the name of Tadashi Suzuki.

I would say those were my two principal non-Western forms of training, and a lot of it is of course very Western.

Content-wise, culturally, I am Indian and received a standard colonial education. So I grew up loving all things Western. But I must say I was also always very fond of Indian stories, especially from Hindu mythology.

Tell us a little bit about the import of the legend of Sohrab and Rustum from Ferdawsi's Shahnameh. Why did you decide to do an adaptation of this piece in particular? Does the Shahnameh have any special relevance to Zoroastrianism?

As children, we grew up with stories from the Shahnameh, particularly Sohrab and Rustum, so if there is a story I have known since childhood, it is this one.

The story is technically pre-Zoroastrian, so it happens in a mythic time. Zoroastrianism actually had its birth in Iran, and around the 8th or 9th century, a small group of Iranian Zoroastrians fled persecution to India, where they came to be called Parsees. So Parsee is really a cultural group, while Zoroastrianism is really the religion.

Growing up as a Parsee in India, I would say that there were a few Shahnameh stories that we were told all the time. My grandfather would read to us from this big collection, but he would read in Gujarati, which was the language we adopted in India. Of course the Shahnameh was written in Persian, so it had to be translated into English, and then from English to Gujarati.

I grew up with the legend of Sohrab and Rustum particularly; it was the most famous one and it was everybody's favorite.

I did not really set out to tell the story of the legend. What I was interested in was telling the story about us, now; about our condition as Parsees, as Zoroastrians, and the things that have shaped us. My generation is the post-baby boom, post-independence generation that stands at the cusp of the second diaspora: the immigration of Parsees from India to the West. There was a huge exodus in the late-'60s, not just of Parsees of course, but we migrated in large numbers, from the Indian subcontinent to the US, the UK and elsewhere in the Western world.

So what has happened between the generations, between the generation of my parents and my own? This is the story that I wanted to explore. I am not sure how it came to me that it should be set in the context of something both epic and contemporary. I started writing a few things and then I suddenly found myself telling both stories simultaneously. In fact I think I always knew that the two would happen simultaneously, the epic and the contemporary, but it didn't become clear to me till I had started writing. I was really writing and creating at the same time.

But of course, this is not a documentary, it is not meant to be representative or typical. I think the danger is that it can be perceived as such. People think this is a Parsee actor doing a Parsee play, and therefore it must be representative of the whole community, and of what it means to be Parsee. There is always that, and obviously the work is not any of these things. It is just one person's take, sitting out in Minnesota, trying to do something. It is definitely not documentary in terms of being representative of reality. In any case, my work is metaphorical; what all these things stand for rather than what it is that you see.

Why did you decide to make this a one-act play?

I don't know if that was something deliberate. I was just starting to tell the story, and being an actor, I just wanted to play all the parts I guess! It is not like Sohrab and Rustum needs to be a one-act performance. In fact when we first started, I was thinking that I would be the principal character, and then there would be others in the background.

I always knew that I wanted live music. At the time, I just had a drummer. When we started out - about three and a half years ago - I would tell him that there is this monologue in what I have written, and describe to him the feeling I wanted to capture, and he would just compose something right there and then. Then we would talk about the composition, and modify it, so we were really writing and creating at the same time.

I don't think there was a deliberate attempt to make it a one-act or one-person thing, it just fell into that and then it soon became apparent as we were rehearsing that this is what it needs to be. It needed to be a one-act play for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was the only Parsee actor in town - in Minneapolis that is - so it didn't really make sense to be looking for people to play these roles, just on a very practical level.

On a conceptual level, there is a very strong story-telling component to the piece, and it made more sense to have one person telling these stories. The interaction is kind of limited because it is really so much about storytelling. It has got that flavor to it and it almost wouldn't work to have other people.

There seems to be a great deal of concern in the community about the gradual disappearance of Zoroastrian and Parsee traditions. Does this motivate your work at all?

This concern was one of the fundamental things that brought me to work on this piece, and I assume that is the case for many other people from the community who do this kind of work. This must be at the back of everybody's minds. It certainly was on mine.

It has to do with the idea of what exactly happened. This is partly why the epic comes into play because the Iranian empire was the dominant empire in the world at one time; Zoroastrianism was the state religion, and so the dominant religion globally. It was one of the first revealed religions. It had this presence and now over time the community has been funneled into a pool of 150,000 stragglers hanging on. There is something interesting in this to me. What happened, and what is happening, to make that funnel even narrower? Are we the cause of this? Or did somebody else bring us to this? So I wanted to investigate that.

And of course, I cannot keep the tradition alive in many ways, but this performance might be one way.

Interview conducted by Nermeen Shaikh of AsiaSource