The most joyful moment in Counting and Cracking involves a homemade Slip ’N Slide. Playing young lovers Siddhartha and Lily, Shiv Palekar and Abbie-lee Lewis strip down to bathing suits and, screaming and giggling, hurl themselves down a long stretch of blue tarp that their castmates hold stretched from the back of the stage at the Skirball Center to the front. Other actors splash the tarp with bowls of water to keep it slick, and another, outfitted like a lifeguard, stands on ground level in front of the stage, ready to keep Lewis and Palekar from shooting into the audience. Meanwhile, three onstage musicians generate a twanging, rollicking tumult of Sri Lankan folk, and thunder rumbles in the distance.
This feeling of levity before the storm permeates much of S. Shakthidharan’s play, a nuanced and sweet-spirited exploration of one Sri Lankan family over 50 years, four generations, and two countries. Siddhartha — a college student in Sydney who considers himself Australian, goes by Sid, and can’t speak Tamil — is the heir to a complicated history that stretches back to and beyond his great-grandfather, Apah (Prakash Belawadi), a Cambridge-educated mathematician and trade minister in the Ceylon parliament during what were, at least for families with big houses and liberal ideals, the halcyon days between Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain in 1948 and the civil war that erupted in 1983. Shakthidharan and his associate writer Eamon Flack (who directs the show with Shakthidharan as his associate) shepherd us through a pretty detailed syllabus, but even at three and a half hours and two intermissions, their play wears its inevitable “epic†epithet lightly. History is given forms and faces by intimacy: The project grew out of Shakthidharan’s longing to know more about his ancestry and involved a deep collaboration with his own mother, the dancer Anandavalli, who choreographed Counting and in the process braved her own reconciliation with the homeland she left at age 12. What they, Flack, & Co. create is necessarily personal, and, perhaps even more important, it’s consistently playful. That Slip ’N Slide represents a rainy swim in Coogee Bay; actors sit on the periphery of the stage, translating in real time for castmates who are speaking Tamil or Sinhala or Turkish — then they gamely become pieces of the setting, animating windows, doors, and telephones with a Puckish “Be Our Guest†energy. When Siddhartha’s mother, Radha (the excellent Nadie Kammallaweera), needs a drink, she simply snaps “wine†at a smiling, cross-legged piece of her house. “To the top,†she adds, just so we’re clear.
Radha is Counting and Cracking’s smart, defensive, aching heart. Another version might have kept Siddhartha, the bright young man and inherent playwright avatar, more firmly in the center, but whether with full intention on Shakthidharan’s part or as a result of Kammallaweera’s sheer tough charisma, or perhaps a bit of both, this production belongs to the mother — and it’s good for the play. When Counting and Cracking wobbles, it does so because its characters’ conversations start to stray into earnest, theme-y territory. As the youngest generation, the ones doing the wondering and discovering rather than the remembering and reliving, Sid and Lily get saddled with a lot of the show’s least elegant dialogue — the kind that takes a highlighter to Big Ideas or packs in just a little more exposition than a moment can gracefully absorb. But while the kids get stuck in talky talk, Radha gets to act. Kammallaweera’s face — when she’s hit with the revelation that her husband, Thirru (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), is still alive after 21 years of thinking him dead — is a wordless soliloquy, panic and bewilderment, heartbreak and denial, remorse and resistance and rage all rolled into a moment. She anchors us in the story’s viscera, even as Radha herself becomes increasingly unmoored.
In a sense, Shakthidharan’s play is an act of reverence for this gradual unmooring. In the program, he writes that his own mother, Anandavalli, “did not talk to me about Sri Lanka in any deep way for the first 30-odd years of my life†but that “the process of making this work has changed her … She has made the choice to be vulnerable. I am grateful for that. It is the hard choice.†While generational tension is surely unique to no particular time, our present is shot through with some undeniably blistering friction between a younger cohort that hunger for progress on their own terms — who are fluent in the language of trauma and long to exorcize it openly — and their elders, whose every ounce of cultural training directs them away from the therapeutic and toward the self-reliant and assimilationist. Cruelty and short-sightedness can run both ways along that spectrum, and part of the poignancy of Counting and Cracking lies in its generosity and emotional maturity. Neither Shakthidharan nor Siddhartha resent or condescend to their forebears (though Sid might groan at his mum every now and then). Instead, they start from a place of tenderness and curiosity, a real desire to learn.
That desire is contagious. It crosses the footlights and helps to fuel Flack’s production, which jumps between 2004 in Sydney and Radha’s childhood in Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. In 1956, Apah and his wife, Aacha (Sukania Venugopal), celebrate the birth of their granddaughter from their well-appointed home where the gates are never locked. Apah is the kind of community elder and benefactor who’s a grandfather to all — an ardent believer in democracy, he credits the “English school in Kopay†with helping him rise in the world by gaining “trousered employment,†and, when government support for English schooling looks to be waning, he personally promises to finance the education of the local fruit vendor’s son, Thirru. Twenty-one years later, the young, gutsy, and idealistic Radha (Radhika Mudaliyar, whose eyes are bright wells of vitality) will admit to loving this very same Thirru (Kaivalya Suvarna), and six years after that, the brutal outbreak of violence backed by the Sinhalese majority government against Sri Lanka’s Tamil population will drop a shrapnel bomb into all of these lives, shredding and scattering them eventually as far as Australia. Some of Shakthidharan and Flack’s most compelling work occurs in Counting’s second and third acts as, respectively, preparations for a family wedding fill Apah and Aacha’s courtyard with jovial chaos, undergirded by dark political rumblings, and, in 1983, these rumblings finally crack the earth. A sequence in which poor Apah — a creature of the old world, all stubborn logic, humanism, and noblesse oblige — receives call after call from local strangers, people begging for his help as their shops are looted and their friends arrested, is a horribly affecting slow burn of heartsickness. We witness the undoing of both an ego and a spirit. Apah has long been a “party of one,†standing against the rightward swing of the government, filibustering in Parliament, and holding out for the principle of equality between Sinhala and Tamil, but now he’s dashed to the ground like a marble statue in a riot, his defining values crushed under jackboot heels.
Shakthidharan doesn’t resist the temptation to cap this emotional climax with a speech in which Apah underlines (well, technically italicizes) the play’s title: “Democracy means the counting of heads within certain limits,†he tells his appalled granddaughter, young Radha, “and the cracking of heads beyond those limits.†But the play gets away with it, due both to the fiery conviction of Belawadi’s and Mudaliyar’s performances and to the spacious, non-mimetic alacrity of Flack’s staging. He doesn’t hammer, and he doesn’t linger. He lets his company move swiftly and lightly, even when the story’s events are at their heaviest. It all makes for a feeling of conscious communal ritual and, at the same time, of vigorous optimism and play. This is theater as rite — it’s no accident that Counting and Cracking gravitates toward weddings and funerals — and also as game. We take hands to mourn and to dance. We go to the river to swim and to spread ashes. We pretend both to comprehend the past and to imagine the future.
If you’ve got an appetite for even more generational conflict, then Matthew Freeman has written a play for you. A perfect fit for Wild Project’s little-but-fierce stage — and an antidote to the glib sensationalism of Job — The Ask unfolds over 80 real-time minutes in the intimidatingly nice Upper West Side apartment of Greta (Betsy Aidem), a longtime donor to the ACLU who’s no longer certain that the organization — now represented by sincere, nonbinary, and Brooklyn-coded zillennial Tanner (Colleen Litchfield) — still upholds the values she’s supported with her checkbook. Although the pair manage to find some common ground in their mutual appreciation of Cindy Sherman and dinosaurs (“Well, we’re going to get along just fine,†says host to guest overhastily), the tension ratchets up from there.
Under Jessi D. Hill’s meticulous direction, Aidem and Litchfield play off each other like expert musicians, both wielding finely tuned instruments but each insisting—at first politely, then with increasing fervor and dissonance — on playing in different keys. On the one hand, the boomer is breezy. “Things have a way of working out,†Greta declares as Tanner winces. On the other, she’s afire with indignation, which seems to be based on principle — “Valiantly losing is very Shakespearean, but it doesn’t keep fascism at bay,†she snaps as they discuss the fallout of losing Roe — but which gradually reveals itself as personal to the point of existential terror.
Tanner, by contrast, seems vulnerable — more put-upon, more careful and equivocal (a moment in which they break down in tears when they think no one is watching is all too real). But their genuinely kind heart and deep integrity become a buoy when the waves get roughest. Freeman brings more than a decade of his own experience as an ACLU fundraiser to The Ask, and his achievement is not only to capture two voices with both precision and spiky humor, but also to venture on a generous exploration of two full, wildly different humanities. Each is trying to construct a bridge to someone on their own side, yet it’s a bridge made of matches over a river of flame.
Counting and Cracking is presented by the Public Theater at NYU’s Skirball Center through September 22.
The Ask is at the Wild Project through September 28.