Theatre Review - Counting and Cracking

Counting and Cracking
- Kamini Dandapani
e-mail: dandapanis@gmail.com

September 23, 2024

Few things can drive a deeper wedge between generations than the experience of war. The horrors are visceral, burrowing deep into the body and psyche, and fundamentally resetting, reshuffling and reconstructing a family's sense of its history and identity. Untold secrets, marinated in pain and anguish, weave their silent web around words and memories and a new generation grows up with the unbearable lightness of not knowing.

Add to this an ocean's span, a new country that is a universe away from the old one, and the chasm between the generations grows even greater.

Writer & Associate Director S Shakthidharan

All this and more, so much more, is explored in the brilliant, heartbreaking, heartwarming, funny, explosively moving play, Counting and Cracking. Written by S. Shakthidharan (who calls Sri Lanka his homeland, and Australia his home), directed by Eamon Flack, co-produced by Australia's Belvoir St Theatre and Kurinji, and with Shakthidharan's mother Anandavalli as cultural adviser, it travels across decades, places and generations, from the early 1950s in Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was known then), to Australia in the present day.

For the last half-century, the story of Sri Lanka has been the one of its civil war which hacked bloody gashes of hatred and violence between the island's linguistic groups, the Sinhalas and the Tamils. Almost all the literature that has emerged from here in the recent past is about this war, in some shape and form. Counting and Cracking is a powerful and eloquent addition to this genre.

The play has many characters, but it never feels crowded or unwieldy. It is three and a half hours long, but it is tightly directed, and the story and acting keep propelling it forward. It switches smoothly between English, Tamil and Sinhala but it's a universal tale that transcends language. A fantastic live orchestra provides the perfect soundscape.

Photo: Brett Boardman

At the center of this whirling maelstrom is Radha, mother of Siddhartha, a 20-something year old dealing with millenial-style angst in Australia. Radha is a firecracker in a petite package; she is shown in the present day, as well as a young woman by a different actor. The transition is seamless and entirely believable. She was married to Thirru, the man she loved. Pregnant with Siddhartha, she is told that he has been captured and killed. Madness and hatred have people in their crazy grip; violence and danger are everywhere, and for the sake of her unborn child, she moves to Australia and begins life afresh. There are her grandparents, now no more, in a Ceylon where Sinhalese and Tamils mingled as friends, neighbors (and lovers), citizens of one island, sharing a moment in history when peace and harmony prevailed. The fulcrum, the pivotal event, in the modern history of this beautiful emerald isle is the civil war that brutalized and tore its people apart, and we see the events unfold through the lives of this family. There is a plot twist that rocks the precarious stability of the family that thought that things had finally settled down.

For all the horror and darkness there are many moments of laughter and lightness. The play opens with the very Australian Siddhartha (who has never set foot in Sri Lanka and has the barest knowledge of, or interest in, his family's fate in the war in that distant island) immersing his grandmother's ashes in the Georges River. A funeral is supposed to be sombre, but this one had me giggling with the befuddled Siddhartha trying to follow the ramblings of the priest and his mother's whip-sharp orders. Another scene that made me laugh out loud was the one where Siddhartha and his girlfriend go wave-surfing at the beach. The Turkish handyman and his "skippy" (Skype) conversation with his son was another dose of levity that provided much-needed humor amid all the sorrow. Life carries on, we find joy in the small things, always.

Counting and Cracking

Photo: Brett Boardman

The play uses minimal props with maximum impact. The sound of rain is evoked by rice falling in a steady stream onto woven trays. Signs at the back of the stage signal a change in time and place. This is gimmick-free, old-fashioned theater at its best.

When I saw the play at NYU's Skirball Theater in lower Manhattan, it was to a full house, with an audience of all stripes, which was so heartening to see. Sometimes, it seems to me that there is a sameness to human history the world over, the cruel messiness, the story of how people who saw themselves as one become divided, like an evil cancerous growth, how easy it is to sow dissent and watch it run rampant, leaving a swathe of hatred, loss and grief in its wake. Nobody is the winner here. And yet, there is hope too, when families connect and communicate, when a new generation awakens to a new world, a clean slate, with fresh eyes and hopes and dreams.

The wheel of life never stops turning.

Kamini Dandapani is an aficionado of Carnatic music, Bharatanatyam and Pianoforte, having trained for many years in all three disciplines from great gurus in Madras. She now lives in New York. Her book, Rajaraja Chola, King of Kings, was published to high acclaim last year, and she is now working on her next book on the empires of southern India.