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Read our review of Counting and Cracking off Broadway, a play by S. Shakthidharan presented by The Public Theater, Belvoir St Theatre, and Kurinji at NYU Skirball.
Why has Radha (a formidable Nadie Kammallaweera) kept her grandfather’s ashes under her bed for the past 21 years? She has difficulty connecting with her adult son, Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar, approaching him with self-aware, likable naivete), who has no intimate experience of his mother’s fraught history as a Tamil surviving the Sri Lanka Civil War. Inspired by his family history, playwright S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking unfolds this family pain in a Sri Lankan Australian family epic spanning about 50 years.
The play, presented by The Public Theater , bounces back and forth from Australia to Sri Lanka, from past to present. The buoyancy of Shakthidharan’s play finds its voice through the energetic direction of its associate writer, Eamon Flack. The first act toys with a lighthearted slice-of-life tone as a foil to the whirlwind second and third acts, which boil up in volcanic arguments between politicians and family members, putting on trial the notion that Sri Lankan politics can be simplified into a game of crickets.
Though Flack’s direction (speckled with Anandavalli’s choreography and costumes) felt cramped in NYU Skirball’s contained proscenium. Still, Flack manages to craft a thrilling pressure cooker of family drama. Proverbial dynamites are planted in a sequence blazing with testimonies of Tamil civilians against government brutality, grievances bouncing off corrupt cop’s deaf ears, a quarrel between granddaughter (younger Radha played by a fierce Radhika Mudaliyar) and grandfather (a fiery Prakash Belawadi).
By the play’s “to be continued” open-endedness of its final scene, I wondered if Shakthidharan intended to write a fourth act. I’ll be happy to watch it.
Inspired by the playwright’s family history, Counting and Cracking is a Belvoir St Theatre and Kurinji co-production that premiered in 2019 in Australia, where many Sri Lankans sought refugee status at the time.
Across its longform three acts, the family saga unravels in the English, Sinhala, Tamil, Turkish and Yolngu Matha languages, with the ensemble providing English translation. The play asks a common question in immigrant and refugee families: “How did we get to be here?”
Twenty-one-year-old Siddhartha and his single mother, Radha, live in Sydney, Australia. They are both making sense of the cultural chasm between them. Then one faithful phone call from a long-lost family member unleashes a flood of his mother’s history dating back to the 1950s, 1970s, and 1980s, unfolding the political turmoil that gripped her politician grandfather and displaced a then-pregnant Radha from Colombo, Sri Lanka.
The conflict concerns the Sri Lankan Civil War between the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which has a mortal cost on the marginalized Tamil community that Radha’s family is in.
Don’t sweat that Counting and Cracking is a 3-hour and 30-minute play with two intermissions. The family saga has a smooth flow and plenty of epic theatre techniques: The ensemble also operates as set dressing, sometimes holding up the appliances and other props in Act 1, finding comic notes.
The momentum of Counting and Cracking owes plenty to the three-person band (Kranthi Kiran Mudigonda, Janakan Suthanthiraraj, and Venkhatesh Sritharan) strumming their percussion instruments to bring Stefan Gregory’s sound design and music composition alive.
The program notes that the play contains direct quotes from real people, including Sri Lankan figures and a journalist.
As of publication, the audience review aggregator Show-Score has seven ratings that calculate into an audience approval score of 90%.
Loaded with powerhouse performers, Counting and Cracking is a thriller of moving parts. Shakthidharan and Flack draw you into the perseverance and introspection of a fractured Sri Lankan Australian family. Before you know it, each act in Counting and Cracking sails by in the blink of an eye.
Learn more and get Counting and Cracking tickets on New York Theatre Guide. Counting and Cracking is at NYU Skirball through September 22.
Photo credit: Counting and Cracking off Broadway. (Photos by Pia Johnson)
Originally published on Sep 13, 2024 02:00
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