BENGALURU: Filmmaker, stand-up comedian and triathlete Anu Vaidyanathan is on a high right now. Currently, on a tour of the world with her maiden stand-up hour BC:AD (Before Children:After Diapers), she recently made her Off-Broadway debut in New York in January. “Performing there was a significant landmark for me, because Broadway is everyone’s dream.
In New York, there are three levels in theatre – Broadway, Off-Broadway, and then the more independent theatres. So to debut Off-Broadway is on every comic’s bucket list. But when I walked in there, I didn’t know what I was getting into, but that made it even sweeter. I walked away with a great sense of accomplishment that we showed up and did the show. And people seem to have enjoyed it,” says Vaidyanathan, who feels her fast-talking ‘American’ cadence helped her a great deal in New York.
BC:AD is an hour of humorous storytelling and not a series of discrete jokes or bits. “The fountainhead of the story is the moment I became a mother. Every woman’s life changes once they have children. So the narrative is about a woman who goes from before having children to after changing diapers. It’s a peephole into her aspirations and how she manages her life after having the added responsibility of two little lives. I have no complaints about being a parent, although I miss the free time and all the open spaces. At the same time, I think, you know, if I had not been a parent, I would have never been an artiste. So I think it was the best piece that I could pick to write an hour on,” shares Vaidyanathan, who is looking forward to performing BC:AD in the city on April 9 at the Bangalore International Centre.
Vaidyanathan is fairly new to stand-up. In that time, she managed to craft two comedy hours, each taking around a year to finish. She believes having a writer’s background helped her ease into stand-up quicker. “Being a writer first has a lot of advantages. You’re never quite short of things to say. It’s more the performative element that needed fine-tuning over the year. To hone my performative skills, I even went to clown school last year for a month and a half and was under the guidance of Philippe Gaulier,” she says adding that she also performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2022, which helped shape her hour better.
As she is a writer, she has dabbled in films as well. In fact, she is currently working on two film projects. “I am a filmmaker first. A couple of my scripts went to the final rounds of Rotterdam and Sundance (film festivals). Currently, I am working on two scripts. One is a comedy and the other is a satirical thriller. I believe I am ready to take both these scripts to the market,” says Vaidyanathan, who outside of writing and directing, also enjoys editing her films.
Vaidyanathan is more than an artiste. She was the first Indian to compete in the Ironman Triathlon in 2006 and three years later, she became the first Asian woman to finish the Ultraman Canada triathlon. Has her experience in athletics helped her in her creative pursuits? “I don’t believe sports answers all the questions. But it does instill a bit of discipline and resilience when it comes to overcoming a bad day.
And you can have several bad days as an artiste, as a stand-up especially. Similarly, I have had bad days in sports as well. I especially remember trying to come back to running postpartum and really breaking my body. So, while there is not at all a direct equivalence between stand-up and athletics, I do think that I’m in a very different place physically and mentally because of my years in triathlon,” she concludes.