Theatre in Review: Counting and Cracking (Belvoir St. Theatre/Public Theater/NYU Skirball Center)

	Shiv Palekar, Abbie-lee Lewis. Photo: Pia Johnson

Counting and Cracking is the most ambitious first play I've seen since...well, maybe ever. It's as if a tyro David Lean picked up a camera and decided to shoot The Bridge on the River Kwai or a novice Tom Stoppard hauled out his Smith-Corona and began pecking away at The Coast of Utopia. S. Shakthidharan's debut work isn't on the level of these masterpieces; still, his sweeping family history drama, set against a background of political upheaval, only becomes more gripping as it unfolds, building to a heart-wrenching final tableau. Whenever a playwright this challenging comes our way, it's cause for celebration.

Shuttling between Australia and Sri Lanka, Counting and Cracking begins in 2004 with Radha, a middle-aged widow, overseeing the disposal of her mother's ashes into Sydney Harbor with the aid of her son Sid (for Siddhartha). From this melancholy beginning, the playwright leans into the humor of generational/cultural conflict: Radha, an emigre from Sri Lanka, thoroughly disapproves of her assimilated offspring, a college student who -- scandalously, to her mind -- refuses to live at home. "What is media studies anyway?" she wonders, casting shade on his chosen major.

But if Sid feels disconnected from his heritage, it's largely because Radha conceals so much about the past. Among other things, he doesn't know that she has, for decades, kept a Tupperware container filled with her father's ashes, which, mysteriously, she can't bring herself to scatter. With a tight-lipped mother and a heritage that takes in both Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority, Sid comes by his confusion honestly. As he tells his girlfriend, Lily, he is from Sri Lanka's Tamil minority "but my name's Sinhalese. I don't speak Tamil, and I've never been to Sri Lanka. Here I am with too much English, a Sinhala name, no Tamil, and some very bad Spanish. I'm a terrible Sri Lankan. Muy terrible." Much of the first act plays as a gentle family comedy, tracking Sid and Lily's growing romance and a mild flirtation between Radha and Ismet, a Turkish air-conditioner installer. It's charming but a bit slow, introducing several supporting characters whose significance is not immediately apparent.

If the leisurely setup is, arguably, evidence of Shakthidharan's lack of experience -- he wrote Counting and Cracking in 2019 -- it is partly allayed by Eamon Flack's direction of an assured cast, including Shiv Palekar's engaging, if uncertain-about-himself Sid; Nadie Kammallaweera's amusingly steely Radha, and Abbie-lee Lewis' charming Lily, who, as a member of Australia's aboriginal Yolngu people, understands Sid's sense of dislocation. Then the playwright drops a bombshell that reorients everything: Thirru, Radha's husband and Sid's father, is not dead, as everyone believed; a recently released political prisoner, he is desperate to be reunited with his family.

The shock of this revelation sends the narrative reeling back to 1957, detailing Radha's youth in Sri Lanka in the home of her grandfather, Apah. A mathematician who becomes deeply embedded in his country's politics, entering parliament and rising to the position of trade minister, Apah believes in his country's post-colonial future, which, in his view, hinges on the complementary interactions of Sinhalese and Tamils. (Sri Lanka's complicated history includes being colonized by the Dutch and British, joining the British Commonwealth in 1947, and becoming a republic in 1950, followed by a twenty-six-year civil war that began in 1983.) At the same time, Sri Lanka is descending into tribalism, signaled by a new law that makes Sinhalese the nation's official language. As Apah warns, it can only lead to ruinous social division: "Two languages, one country. One language, two countries."

He is, of course, prophetic. By the 1980s, the insurgent Tamil Tigers are fighting back, and violence overtakes the country. Meanwhile, Radha grows up into an independent thinker who loves math and rejects the husband her family selects for her. Instead, she chooses Thirru, a young engineer and former student of Apah's. The relatively apolitical Thirru gets caught up in events partly thanks to the involvement of his sister Swathi with the Tigers. (Scarred by the death of a friend, she chooses to fight back, joining the rebel army.) As Colombo, the capital city, falls victim to waves of street attacks and Thirru is reported dead, the pregnant Radha decides to flee. Jumping ahead to 2004, she and Sid anxiously track Thirru's progress as a refugee; unfairly branded as a terrorist, he isn't eligible for a passport and must follow a refugee route that takes him through India. Speaking on the phone to the father he didn't know was alive, Sid says, "Can I be honest with you? As far as I'm concerned, you don't exist." Thirru replies, "Can I be honest with you, Siddhartha? I feel the same way about you."

Written for an Australian audience, Counting and Cracking will likely be challenging for Americans who haven't been closely following decades-long gyrations of Sri Lankan politics. The play assumes knowledge of figures such as John Howard, Australia's conservative Prime Minister; S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, prime minister of Ceylon (Sri Lanka's former name) and architect of the Sinhalese language law; and Australia's immigration policies. The play is performed in English, Sinhalese, and Tamil, with lines spoken in the latter two languages verbally translated by actors on the sidelines. This creates a slight distancing effect, exacerbated by many of the cast's heavy accents. If you choose to attend Counting and Cracking, you must listen very, very closely. Also, even with a three-and-a-half-hour running time, Shakthidharan must tell his story in the broadest of strokes; certain characters and developments are introduced only to get lost in the tumult of events.

And yet: There's something eerily familiar about the play's depiction of a society fraying under the strain of tribalism and naked power grabs. In the most disturbing sequence, set in the 1980s, Apah fields a series of calls from friends and acquaintances who are witnessing attacks on Tamils across the capital city of Colombo. He reaches out to the police and government figures, who dismiss his warnings or simply do nothing. The old man, blindsided, is suddenly a prisoner in his own house, as the democracy he has spent his life supporting tumbles around him.

Flack's production is filled with revelatory moments: Sid, coached by a Hindu priest, awkwardly trying to pour his grandmother's ashes into the water in the prescribed way; Radha's chilling encounter with a pair of Tamils going door-to-door, collecting money for a school ("You know what happens to people who disagree with us," she is told); Thirru, on the run, risking it all on a dangerous boat trip to Australia; Apah being carried into his home in handcuffs ("I simply spoke in parliament for four hours straight and there was no time for anyone to pass any bill of any kind."); and Radha nostalgically recalling her youth, when friends from several cultures would gather to celebrate Ramadan with Muslim neighbors. "That was Sri Lanka," she says. "That was my Ceylon."

In addition to those cast members already mentioned, there are incisive contributions from Kaivalya Suvarna as the bright, full-of-promise young Thirru and Anthonyhasan Jesuthasan as his middle-aged counterpart, degraded by years of incarceration; Radhika Mudaliyar as the purposeful younger version of Radha, and Ahilan Karunaharan as Anil, an Indian Tamil businessman who takes possession of Apah's home and ends up an unwilling go-between for Thirru and his family. Dale Ferguson's set, defined by the brightly colored outline of a tent, provides a frame for the fast-moving staging; his costumes note the many shifts in time frames, locations, and cultural assumptions. Damien Cooper's lighting and Stefan Gregory's original music and sound design do much to evoke the play's differing worlds.

For all its violent disorders, its haunting sense of exile, Counting and Cracking offers hope in a conversation in which Sid and Lily thoughtfully explore a way for them to be together as modern Australians connected to and sharing their heritages. And the play ends on a stunning note, outside a refugee camp, which brings together past and present, the living and the dead. A golden opportunity to catch the work of Belvoir St. Theatre, the well-known Sydney-based troupe, Counting and Cracking presents a picture of democracy under extreme stress that couldn't be more relevant; if you're willing to listen to it, you're likely to find it a deeply rewarding, even necessary, experience. Bravo to writers (and theatre companies) with such ambitions. --David Barbour