Counting and Cracking” tells the story of four generations of one family from Sri Lanka –  once called Ceylon, an island nation off the coast of India – whose later generations were forced by civil strife to emigrate to Australia.  It has a cast of 16 actors, who each portray a named character (some of them the same character but at different ages) as well as a country’s worth of villagers and visitors, servants and soldiers. It runs for three and a half hours, with two intermissions, in scenes set from 1956 to 2004, but  jumping back and forth in time. As we’re told in a brief prologue, the actors, who come from six different countries and speak eleven different languages, portray characters who speak on stage in English, Sinhala, Tamil, Turkish and Yolngu Matha – this last one, an indigenous language of northern Australia. There are also snippets of Sanskrit and Arabic. The play does a relatively deep dive into decades of Sri Lankan politics. The characters like to talk about cricket.

So let me acknowledge: “Counting and Cracking” makes some unusual demands on a New York theater audience. 

But those willing and able to engage with it are ultimately rewarded with a memorable and meaningful saga – one with a few vividly etched characters, moments of charged emotion and suspenseful melodrama worthy of Dickens or “Casablanca,” some masterful or playful staging, and a powerful message about the effects of public turmoil on individual lives.

“Counting and Cracking” begins with a bare-chested young man looking uncomfortable as he recites some words in a language he doesn’t know, and gets dunked with water.

This is Sid (Shiv Palekar), it is 2004, and he’s in a park in Sydney, Australia, the only country he’s ever known, performing a funeral rite for his grandmother, under the supervision of a Hindu priest and Sid’s bossy mother Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera), who named her son Siddhartha and would much prefer he use that name.  Sid empties the urn with his Ammamma’s ashes into the Georges River. The ritual over, he promises to call Radha in a week or so and come over for dinner, leaving her to confide in the priest: “Twenty one years ago I left Sri Lanka with my son in here” – she points to her belly – “and my grandfather’s ashes in a tupperware container.” Those ashes have been sitting under her bed for twenty-one years. 

That first scene introduces us to three of the central figures in the play.

Sid is an evident stand-in for the playwright and associate director S. Shakthidharan, an Australian of Sri Lankan heritage.  While most of the other main characters are threaded throughout the decades of the play, we see Sid only in 2004, but he makes an interior journey, as he learns more about both his heritage and his family…especially what happened to his father – and begins a romance with Lily (Abbie-Lee Lewis), an aboriginal from the North of Australia; together they struggle with the nature of identity and home.

Radha is unmistakably the heart of the play. We see her in scenes when she’s born; when as a young woman (portrayed by Radhika Mudaliyar) she confronts her family and insists on marrying the man she loves, Thirru (Kaivalya Suvarna); and when in 1983 she was told her husband Thirru (now Antonythasan Jesuthasan), had been killed because of the organized mob violence that would lead to Civil War; she is urged to flee to Australia – helped by Hasa (Sukhbir Singh Walia) the suitor she had rejected for Thirru. (That’s what reminded me of “Casablanca.”) As we eventually learn (spoiler alert): Thirru did not die. 

The character who is the intellectual and political center of the play, and arguably the most intriguing, is Radha’s grandfather, Apah (Prakash Belawadi), an official in the government who grew up poor in a family of Tamils, the minority ethnic group in a country dominated by the Sinhalese.  Apah owes both his status and his sense of justice, as he tells anybody who will listen, to mathematics.  It was his talent for mathematics that got him into Cambridge. And an understanding of algebra led him to an appreciation of democracy.  “The principle of equality means that whatever is given to one side is also given to the other” – a formula for Sinhalese and Tamil to live in harmony.

But then he’s visited by his friend and fellow Cabinet member Vinsander, who tells him there is a movement to have Sinhalese replace English as the official state language.

Apah objects, in a saying that sounds like another formula, but is a warning: “Two languages, one country. One language, two countries.”

Vinsander knew this would be his friend’s view, which is why he is there to tell him that the prime minister has kicked him out of his post, and the party. Vinsander becomes what Apah calls his “PF/PE” (personal friend, political enemy.)

This is just the first sign of the tensions between the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority, which soon turns violent – and changes Apah’s political philosophy. The play’s title comes from a story Apah tells Radha about an incident that happened when he was a child in his village. For generations, the villagers had produced a homegrown liquor for their own consumption. When the British colonial government decided to regulate the liquor, the village ignored them. When it sent men to enforce the law, the village women broke pots over their heads and drove them back to their cities. That, Apah says, is when “I first learnt the rudiments of democracy. Democracy means the counting of heads, within certain limits, and the cracking of heads beyond those limits.” 

Director Eamon Flack displays an impressively subtle touch in his staging of the violence that turns Radha into an emigrant and Thirru eventually into a refugee. It’s nothing more than one character after the other calling Apah for help against an encroaching mob outside their shop or office or home – the actors placed in various spots throughout the theater – simple, basic, somehow harrowing.  There is similar low-tech stagecraft that effectively conveys the emotions of the moment – whether tense, or, in many instances, joyous: At one point Sid and Lily “swim” on a wet, shiny piece of blue fabric held by their castmates. Three musicians sit on the side of the stage throughout, performing the lively percussive music composed by Stefan Gregory.

Flack is the artistic director of Sydney-based company Belvoir St. Theater where the play was first staged in 2019. This certainly explains why the occasional posting of place names like “Coogee” on a backdrop is supposed to be helpful in clearing up any possible confusion about where a scene is taking place. (Coogee, my atlas tells me, is “a beachside suburb in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney.”) It might also help explain why the production didn’t also use a backdrop to project captions, despite the mix of languages, accents and cultural references unfamiliar to many New York theatergoers. This feels worse than a missed opportunity; it feels negligent.

In a program note, the playwright explains that he began “Counting and Cracking”  a decade ago as a personal quest to find out more about his mother’s homeland, but it expanded past the personal, gaining power “to connect people across deep divides.” What helps the willing theatergoer transcend any (cultural and linguistic) divides is the power of art to make connections even as (or, precisely because) it remains personal. The director’s mother, Anandavalli, is credited as the “choreographer, costume and cultural advisor” for the show.

Counting and Cracking
A co-production of the Public Theater and NYU Skirball at NYU Skirball through September 22
Running time: Three and a half hours including two intermissions
Tickets: $21 – $125
Written and Associate Directed by S. Shakthidharan
Directed and Associate Written by Eamon Flack
Set and costume design by Dale Ferguson, lighting design byDamien Cooper, and sound design and music composition by Stefan Gregory.Anandavalli serves as choreographer and costume and cultural advisorCast: Rodney Afif as Ismet and ensemble, Prakash Belawadi as Apah and ensemble, Senuri Chandrani as Swathi and ensemble, Antonythasan Jesuthasan as Thirru and ensemble, Nadie Kammallaweera as Radha and ensemble, Ahilan Karunaharan as Sunil and ensemble,Abbie-Lee Lewis as Lily and ensemble, Gandhi MacIntyre as priest and ensemble, Radhika Mudaliyar as Young Radha and ensemble,Shiv Palekar as Siddhartha and ensemble, Dushan Philips as Vinsanda and ensemble, Sukhbir Singh Walia as Hasaanga and ensemble,Nipuni Sharada as Nihinsa and ensemble, Kaivalya Suvarna as young Thirru and ensemble,Rajan Velu as Balu and ensemble, and Sukania Venugopal as Aacha and ensemble.They are joined by musicians Kranthi Kiran Mudigonda, Venkhatesh Sritharan,and Janakan Suthanthirara
Photos by Pia Johnson