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New York laughs out loud with ‘Unladylike’ Radhika Vaz

One of the first rules in comedy is to approach the obvious. The obvious for Mumbai-born Radhika Vaz, a comedic actor and writer, is that she just doesn’t have the “body or heart” to be a prissy little lady.

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One of the first rules in comedy is to approach the obvious. The obvious for Mumbai-born Radhika Vaz, a comedic actor and writer, is that she just doesn’t have the “body or heart” to be a prissy little lady. So when you see Manhattan’s new star in the making performing her one-woman show Unladylike: The Pitfalls of Propriety, expect an irreverent take on Indian expectations about virgin brides, fake orgasms and how women will say anything to get a man between the sheets.

Vaz talked a blue streak at the Producers Club in New York and had the audience in hysterics at her second run of sold-out comedy shows in November. During her show she burst into a livewire Lady Gaga imitation before letting rip on how women have created a planet on which men can get away with things women can’t even dream about. “… I am a lady with body hair. I am a Hirsute Harriet, a Hairy Mary.  If I were a man, this would be quite all right,” Vaz tempered while stalking the stage on stylish black heels.

“So I have spent the better part of my life, and my savings, waxing and shaving and tweezing and threading and plucking and pulling and epilating and depilating every square inch of myself. I have been forced to keep up with the latest technology in hair removal because someone, somewhere, decided that the authentic female body was too vile to be seen as it is,” she exclaims.
Then she jokes: “People ask me, why do Indian women get married so young? Is it because your parents insist upon it? Is it because of the religious and social pressures of your culture? No, actually, we just want to stop shaving our legs.” 

Just when you think she is done, Vaz warms up to her subject; “I believe that the number one reason for a woman to walk away from a spontaneous sexual encounter is untended body hair. Of course, we would never tell that to a man, so we improvise. ‘I’m not that kind of girl. I’ve come with my friends. I have typhoid.’ More cow shit. It’s so unfair isn’t it?” The audience laughs in agreement.

These comedic rants have now become Vaz’s trademark. Rather remarkable as Vaz slipped into New York’s tough-as-nails, male-dominated comedy circuit from the buttoned-down corporate world. She worked as an ad-executive in Chennai and New York before discovering improvisational theatre. Vaz, who has a Masters in advertising from Syracuse University, has traded the nine-to-five world for the vagaries of theatre life.

“One day, I took an improv class with a woman called Holly Mandel and finally found something I wanted to be good at. Improv helped me find my feet as a performer and a writer,” said Vaz, who now teaches students in New York how to create great scenes and characters that engage the audience.

“I enjoy working with other writers which is why I did The Kat and Rad Show — a medley of sketches written with my friend Kat,” added Vaz. Vaz met her current show’s director Brock Savage, a gifted writer and stand-up comic performer at Caroline’s on Broadway, in improv school and he helped her battle through her initial nerves by encouraging her to tell her own stories. The result was Unladylike which Savage says mixes theatrical genres by straddling storytelling, stand-up comedy and theatre. “Radhika is very opinionated and has all these unique takes on things. In ‘Unladylike’ there is a very particular character on stage who is Radhika, but a version of Radhika,” says Savage.

“It is a very in-your-face, funny, naughty exploration of what it is like to be a woman, an Indian woman. It discusses the issues and frustrations of what women have to put up with in the world, not in an angry, tirade sort of way but funny, ribald fashion. You don’t have to be Indian to appreciate the show because the themes are universal, but since the pieces are personal and Radhika is an Indian woman, there are particulars to being an Indian woman that get discussed.”

The show has Vaz poring over marriage ads in Indian newspapers including one that announces an “Innocent divorcee, age 25, seeks groom.” Vaz promptly decodes, “An ‘innocent divorcee’ is a divorced woman who had managed to cling to her hymen the entire time that she was married.”

Vaz plays a funny, poised, confident woman on ‘Unladylike’, and it’s hard to imagine her as shy. But Vaz says she has a hard time opening up in front of people. “As a kid I was in awe of women who refused to be wallflowers, but stood out like the flaming tips of their cigarettes. I enjoy putting that on stage because off-stage I am not bold as brass. My husband calls me a paper tiger. That is why putting this other me on stage was such fun.” 

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