Review: Aasif Mandvi Makes You Want to Stop at ‘Sakina’s Restaurant’

NEW YORK — Azgi had stars in his eyes when he left his native India for New York City. But his nights have become haunted by an unexpected recurring vision. “I am a giant tandoori chicken wearing an Armani suit,” Azgi, now a waiter at an Indian restaurant on East Sixth Street, says. “I am sitting behind the wheel of a speeding Cadillac. I have no eyes to see, no mouth to speak, and I don’t know where I am going.”

Ah, that feeling of being out of place and out of control, with a hint of luxury you can’t fully enjoy: What Azgi is describing in Aasif Mandvi’s play “Sakina’s Restaurant” is not the American dream but the American immigrant experience.

Mandvi, the versatile writer and actor best known for his nearly 10 years as a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” has just brought back his solo comedy 20 years after its premiere. And at its funniest, which is often also its most uncomfortable, it has gained a new resonance.

The naïve, enthusiastic Azgi (portrayed, like all the characters, by Mandvi) anchors the evening, which centers on the titular restaurant, rendered, in Wilson Chin’s set, as a homey joint adorned with photos, posters and multicolor lights. The place is named after the owners’ daughter. When we meet her, Sakina is a teenager who appears to be fully integrated: She wants to play in a band and still makes out with her ex-boyfriend, an American who mistook her for Iranian.

But Sakina has also been betrothed since she was 11, and she ends up marrying a fellow Muslim named Ali. Like all the people we meet over the course of this tight 90-minute show, presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater, Sakina must navigate the compromises necessary for integration in both her native and adopted cultures.

Mandvi does not need much to segue from one character to another. Sometimes it’s a small accessory (aviator glasses for the owner, Hakim; a bright blue scarf for his wife, Farrida), but mostly he simply modifies his posture, slightly tweaks the way he speaks. Sakina and her younger brother, Samir, don’t have accents, for instance, though this does not necessarily help them blend in America. (And it’s always “America” in the show, by the way, never the United States. The first word is an idea melding into an ideal; the second is a reality.)

Wisely, 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 and that Portishead’s “Glory Box” is playing during a scene in which Ali, stressed out by the need to relieve his sexual urges before getting married, goes to a prostitute named Angel.

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. After Ali tells Angel he’s a Muslim, he asks if she knows what that is. A pause. “Yes, it’s a type of cloth,” he adds. And suddenly, “Sakina’s Restaurant” has acquired a new, somber underlining, making us miss a time when ignorance was paired with benign disinterest rather than hate.

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“Sakina’s Restaurant”

Through Nov. 11 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; 800-982-2787, minettalanenyc.com.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.