Karan Brar’s stage debut, ‘Data,’ hits close to home on many levels

Being a Disney kid gave him a specific type of acting education. "Get bigger, and we will bring you down when we need you to," is how he describes the methodology he took away from his experience. "Every young actor who grows up in that space has this recalibration process where they are trying to bring themselves back down and find a really earnest performance." Currently performing eight shows a week at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the off-Broadway play Data, Brar is in the middle of that recalibration.

Data was his first theater audition and the play centers a character who is eerily similar to Brar: young Maneesh is a first-generation Indian American programmer working at a Silicon Valley tech firm, who finds himself caught at a moral crossroads when he learns more about the work he’s been hired to do. When Brar first read the script, the proximity of the character to his own life gave him pause. "I read the play and I felt like one of the characters in Euphoria, where she goes, ‘Is this f*cking play about (us)?’” he says.

The play, as it was written, even references the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. Brar’s mother was living in Calcutta at the time and actually experienced the horrors. Growing up in a Punjabi family, his mother had told him stories of her firsthand accounts. When he was cast for the role, he asked the playwright, Matthew Libby, if one small detail, the city of Maneesh's mother's origin, could be changed to Calcutta. Libby agreed and that adjustment is the only piece of Brar that was deliberately placed inside the role. "The rest was on (the) page," he says, "which is such a luxury as an actor." But proximity to the character doesn’t always make the work easier. "Sometimes you assume that the closer something is to your own life, the easier it is to step into,” he explains. “But if something is so close to you, it can feel like you're glazing over nuance."

And it definitely was not an easy transition for him. He almost talked himself out of playing Maneesh before rehearsals even started. "I had a lot of friends having to talk me off the ledge,” he says, “because I was like, what if I'm not as good? What if I can't hold my weight against these guys?" The supporting cast of the play, which includes Brandon Flynn, Sophia Lillis, and Justin H. Min, were all actors whose work he had watched and admired. But underneath the anxiety of an actor transitioning from screen to stage was something a bit heavier. "I think when any person of color takes on their first leading role, there is the fear of, ‘If I do well, or if I don't, this will establish a precedent for my career,’" Brar says.

The play’s central themes are data, artificial intelligence, surveillance, and how they are being used by tech giants and the government to target the most vulnerable communities in the United States. The story builds toward a confrontation and a reveal that varies in reaction depending on the night and the audience in house. The show first premiered at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. and opened the night President Donald Trump was announced as president-elect for the second time. "There was such an eeriness and a stiffness in the air,” Brar recalls from that night. Today, at the stage door, data scientists and software engineers who have come to see the show share real concern about how accurate the story seems to be. Some evenings, depending on what has happened in the news that day, there are even audible gasps from the audience that the actors can hear from the stage.

One night in January, between the matinee and the evening shows, the director pulled Brar aside and asked if he’d seen the news. She told him to check his phone and it was then that he learned of Alex Pretti’s death. Pretti was a nurse who had been shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis while he was filming an immigration enforcement operation on his phone. "It had such a massive shift in the way that the audience reacted (that night),” he says. The gasps he and his castmates picked up from the stage were people connecting dots in real time between the story they had bought a ticket to see and the one in the news.

"These aren't stories that we're imagining. These are real stories impacting real people."

In New York, the cast wears handmade buttons at the end of the performance, thanks to Flynn's handiwork. They are old buttons with the word ICE crossed out in marker and held together with scotch tape. It is a tender gesture, but it says something about what the cast hopes people carry with them after seeing the show. What Brar keeps returning to is the strange privilege of making art that is this timely. "These aren't stories that we're imagining," he says. "These are real stories impacting real people." That weight is not lost on him, especially on the nights when an audience laughs in places the cast didn't expect, or when a loud chorale of gasps in the house tells them the country has shifted, yet again, between the matinee and the evening show.

Brar wants audiences to leave with more clarity, and not dread. "I hope they feel more secure in their understanding of the problem,” he says, “And to question: how am I complicit in this system?" It's not a comfortable place to leave people. It's the kind of question that doesn't have a clean answer, on stage or off the stage. For now, an honest performance and the refusal to look away is where Brar’s sights are set.

Data runs at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York through March 29.