About the production
Aasif Mandvi plays half a dozen characters in a one-man play about the Indian-American family that runs a Lower East Side restaurant and the young immigrant waiter who arrives to work there.
“Director Kimberly Senior stages the evening in impeccable fashion (it was originally directed and developed by Kim Hughes), smoothing the fast-paced transitions and blasting period-appropriate pop songs between scenes.”
— Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck
“Under Kimberly Senior's direction, Mandvi is particularly moving as the show's two women: Farrida, a former dancer uprooted from the country she loved by her husband's dream, and Sakina, an Americanized teen oppressed by cultural customs.”
— TimeOut NY, Raven Snook
“Mr. Mandvi and his director, Kimberly Senior — with whom he worked on the Off Broadway production of Ayad Akhtar's 'Disgraced,' in 2012 — have kept the story set in the blithe, pre-9/11 days of 1998. On a surface level, that means that Samir is still glued to his Game Boy.... But the implications run deeper than vintage video games and songs: The show takes place in a different era, when being an immigrant of a certain faith certainly wasn't easy, but it also was somewhat less burdened with stigma..... 'Sakina's Restaurant' has acquired a new, somber underlining, making us miss a time when ignorance was paired with benign disinterest rather than hate.”
— The New York Times (Critic's Pick), Elisabeth Vincentelli
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Credits
Written by Aasif Mandvi
Directed by Kimberly Senior
Featuring Aasif Mandvi
Set Wilson Chin
Lights Mary Louise Geiger
Sound Jill BC Du Boff
Costumes Jennifer Caprio
