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For the past many months, theaters have been scrambling to figure out what works for their audiences online.
Is it filmed drama performed to empty seats?
Rao is very frank about what he is not.
He is also clear that hes not teaching us to make traditional Indian cuisine.
The showBollywood Kitchencan occasionally feel like a promotion for the cookbook.
(My parents were pioneers!
Rao says, before showing Raj Kapoor dancing Charlie Chaplinishly down a road in the 1955 movieShree 420.)
White audiences, he says, prefer immigrant stories with a little sweetness added.
If youre too messy, they wont invite you back on NPR, he says.
The messy version is painful.
Decades later and a generation removed, the harshness of that treatment clearly still pains their son.
His own childhood in Mechanicsburg wasnt great for a brown, not-very-straight-seeming boy, he says.
Home-cooked food and movie nights on the couch were thus clearly a refuge for them all.
Rao manages to tell us all this while walking us quickly through a curry recipe and a dessert.
Not everyone will be so …
The one element thats sacrificed is a sense of spontaneous revelation since his more vulnerable disclosures can seem overrehearsed.
His control slides, at such moments, into glibness.
So what works best inBollywood Kitchenis its cheerful approach to error.
he said, unruffled.
Add yogurt if its too hot, he said; add coriander if it needs a little boost.
Im still preening.)
In Raos kitchen and in his show, wrong doesnt mean disaster.
Instead, accidents are expected, and theyre an opportunity for adjustment and invention.
But his nothings-so-broke-you-cant-fix-it attitude is the smaller version of their larger courage.
Bollywood Kitchenis at theGeffen Playhousethrough March 6.
