McCarter Theatre’s First South Asian Musical Took Me Back to Forbes Basement

The McCarter Theatre stage filled up with dancers in turbans, kurtas, and salwars in a kaleidoscope of colors. As they raised their arms and danced, I stared in disbelief. Could this really be happening, here? My shoulders were already moving to the beat.

A Beat of Our Own is a new musical comedy about a group of misfits who form a college dance team. It is McCarter’s first South Asian musical and the largest production in the theater’s history.

Watching with my 12-year-old daughter, I laughed at the jokes, teared up when the lead danced with her deceased mom in a dream sequence, and felt pure joy when the colorfully costumed team lit up the stage. Based on a book by New Jersey native Rehana Lew Mirza and her husband, Mike Lew, A Beat of Our Own follows a fractious bunch of college students who quarrel over questions of identity and culture as they come together to find a community and love on a bhangra dance team.

Preeti, a purist, wants to dance bhangra as it’s done in Punjab, while Sunita, who makes papier-mâché uteruses as protest art, wants to overthrow anything reeking of tradition. Caught between them is Mary, who, like many college students, is still figuring out who she wants to be. Watching them feud over identity and dance, I felt an uncanny sense of déjà vu. 

Nearly three decades ago, my friends and I founded Princeton South Asian Theatrics (PSAT), which we believe was the nation’s first South Asian campus theater troupe. Like the ragtag dance team in the show, we were misfits who would never have passed an audition. We belonged simply because we showed up.

We rehearsed in the Forbes College basement, across the street from Princeton’s 24-hour Vegas Strip — the Wawa, where the crowds at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, after the eating clubs closed, swelled larger than at 2 in the afternoon. Fueled by Wa dogs and hoagies, we wrote and performed our comedies about the South Asian American experience, complete with obligatory Bollywood dance numbers.   

Comedy was our sloppy way of figuring out who we were and wanted to be. Performing at Forbes’ Blackbox Theater and touring over fall break, we built a South Asian arts community at Princeton.

You don’t have to be Michelle Obama ’85 to know that Princeton was a difficult place for many of us who were neither rich nor white. This was the era of Gay Jeans Day, when students wore jeans on a specific date to support the right of LGTBQ+ people to exist. Princeton’s rigid social order built around the eating clubs may have been tough for students of all types of backgrounds.

Many of us felt out of place in the culture of the Street. The social space available to “minority” students was the Third World Center, at the far end of Prospect Street, where ethnic associations such as South Asian Students Association (SASA) hosted fall and spring cultural shows with traditional musical and dance performances.

A Beat of Our Own opens in a similar milieu, with a team performing traditional bhangra at an intercollegiate competition. Conflict ensues when Mary wants to experiment with other dance forms, leading her and Sunita to create a rebel faction that challenges what it means to “belong” to a culture.

We had our own Sunita, a politics graduate student and Princeton’s one-man progressive movement who wanted to drop a 15-minute skit into SASA’s traditional fall cultural show. We wrote about two feuding families, one rich and one poor, who send their son and daughter to Princeton. I played the female lead’s overbearing cardiologist father.

In typical IST (Indian Stretchable Time) fashion, our 15-minute skit had turned into 45 minutes by showtime, long enough to become the first act of a two-act play, Desis of Our Lives. Thus, in spring 1999, PSAT was officially born. 

In 2019, I came back to Princeton as a visiting professor to teach in the Program in Journalism. At the welcoming reception for new faculty in Chancellor Green Rotunda, I ran into professor Gyan Prakash, a historian of South Asia, who had been one of the few Indian faculty members when I was a student.

He introduced me to a colleague as the rich cardiologist father in a play from 20 years earlier, then began reciting my lines. Like a fool, I tried to correct the historian’s recollection, suggesting that the dialogue had been slightly different. “No, you’re wrong,” he said.

To everyone else in that rotunda, I might have been a writer or journalist. To him, I was still the funny boy who played the mean Indian dad. 

In fall 2022, a student in my journalism seminar invited me to a dance performance by Naacho, a South Asian dance troupe on campus. In a packed auditorium in Frist Campus Center, dancers unleashed a dazzling succession of routines in multiple genres, with elaborate costume changes, video montages and, of course, Bollywood numbers.

My student informed me that Naacho auditions were fiercely competitive and many aspirants were rejected. Clearly, I would have never made the cut at Naacho, or the Princeton Bhangra Team, or the handful of other dance and music groups that, along with PSAT, now make up a thriving South Asian arts community on campus. 

I enjoy living in Princeton precisely because it is culturally a richer and more vibrant place than when I was a student. Watching A Beat of Our Own, my daughter loved the Bollywood tunes and a haunting Punjabi ballad about homecoming. Having lived in India for six years, she turned to me with a look of stunned recognition and said, “I want all my friends to see this.” 

It was as though the show had unlocked something about herself that she had never quite been able to explain. Something magical happens when strangers gather in a darkened theater. Through laughter and recognition, we find connection across divides and become a community. That’s the power of a place like McCarter.         

Our basement world, and the stories we told, once seemed universes away from McCarter’s stage. Now, with A Beat of Our Own, those stories have moved to center stage.

Join fellow alumni and families Sunday, Oct. 18, for a matinee performance of A Beat of Our Own at McCarter Theatre, followed by an exclusive alumni reception with the cast featuring chai (or something stronger) and savory South Asian snacks.

You may contact Kushanava Choudhury ’00 with questions at choudhry@alumni.princeton.edu.