Embracing the Elephant in the Room

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This article was published 26/07/2023 (773 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Priyanka Shetty has mixed feelings about her parents watching her show. Shetty’s The Elephant in the Room is a monologue based on her experiences of growing up in India, embarking on a career as a software engineer and then leaving it all behind to move to the States to pursue her dream of becoming an actor.

The hour-long show is running at Théâtre Cercle Molière (Venue 3) to Saturday.

“I’ve always wanted to be an actor,” Shetty says. “I joined the drama club in school when I was 12, and at 13 I directed and performed in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and that was the extent to which I got involved in theatre.

“I picked it up many years later when I was working as an engineer at a software company back in India. I actually started a theatre group in secret because my family was super-opposed to the idea of me being on stage.”

Shetty adapted an Indian novel, Chokher Bali by Rabindranath Tagore, into a play, directed, produced and performed in it and managed to get her IT company to fund it as an “employee engagement event.”

“It was a raging success — they tripled our budget and soon we were performing the musical My Fair Lady. I played Eliza Doolittle and directed it, too,” she says. “It was when we started gaining attention and booking gigs outside of the company and had newspaper articles about our shows I decided to come clean and tell my family about my passion.”

Her family was initially unhappy about her decision to quit a career and the education they had invested in her, but despite their misgivings, Shetty forged ahead and in 2016 moved to the United States to pursue an MFA in acting at the University of Virginia.

The first play in her triptych of solos, The Elephant in the Room, is a witty, dark comedy about Shetty’s experiences navigating life as an immigrant in Trump’s America.

The current version of the show, which was voted “Most Popular” at the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe by The Scotsman after its month-long run, is a refined version of the original work, which she wrote in 2018.

The show she is presenting at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival is now fully developed after approximately 75 other performances, she says.

“This play continues to surprise me with how much more it has to offer every single time I perform it and the immense impact it continues to have on audience members,” she says. “Spoiler alert — there are no live elephants in this production.”

The work is an unflinching look at Shetty’s experiences in the U.S., where her japes were often taken literally — “I once joked about how elephants were the primary mode of transport in India and someone actually believed me” — and stereotypes of anyone deemed “not American” abounded.

She says she wasn’t prepared for how much of a bubble the U.S. could be and how little most people knew about the world and cultures outside of it.

“The attitude of ‘the other’ and the use of the word ‘otherness’ was so distasteful and jarring to me that I had to write this piece as an artistic response, especially after my unfortunate experiences as an international student in an academic environment,” she says.

But it’s not all negative. Shetty, who now lives in Philadelphia, found warmth and acceptance from communities who had also been on the receiving end of discrimination and racist behaviours.

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Shetty’s parents are more accepting of her career choice now, but she thinks they would prefer if she taught at a university or went back to IT.

“They have not seen the show yet and I’m actually looking forward to, and dreading, the day they’ll see it, because I have no idea how they’ll react,” she says.

Shetty has not yet performed the work in India, but says there have been talks about a tour that she’s eager to rekindle.

“I think this play would really resonate with audiences in India and I can’t wait to perform there.”

av.kitching@winnipegfreepress.com

AV Kitching
Reporter

AV Kitching is an arts and life writer at the Free Press. She has been a journalist for more than two decades and has worked across three continents writing about people, travel, food, and fashion. Read more about AV.

Every piece of reporting AV produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.