By any means necessary, book your tickets to “Counting and Cracking,” a 3.5-hour-long play about Sri Lanka, Australia and the elusive search for home currently running at NYU’s Skirball Center and put on by the Public. It’s only playing till Sept. 22.
I watched this epic show this past weekend and am on a mission to get everyone I know to see it, not dissimilar from how I felt after “Public Obscenities,” which I wrote about earlier this year. Like that ground-breaking play, this one is delivered in a mix of languages, overlapping tongues that defy translation but rendered creatively nonetheless: Sinhalese, Tamil, English, motherhood, militancy.
And like that Bengali-English show, which clocked in at more than three hours, this one is long, really long, too. Before I get into the why, here’s how you can get tickets:
- Go to the main NYU Skirball website and buy them.
- Until Sept. 11, there’s $20 tickets with code CC20PREV.
- TDF had tickets through this weekend for $38 a piece. Keep checking for subsequent dates.
- And good news for NYU students. Your tickets are $18; different discounts apply for alumni and faculty.
There’s an intimacy to “Counting and Cracking” rooted in the set’s simplicity; just a charpoy and chair, a heavy gate protecting a Colombo family home from violence and unrest outside, and props such as telephones, buzzers, even dust and rain carried by a cast of translators. From the show’s own description:
“The sweeping, episodic play features 19 performers from across the globe on a multi-generational journey of a Sri Lankan-Australian family from 1956-2004. Radha fled Sri Lanka with her unborn child as the nation struggled with conflict. Two decades later, her son Siddhartha, now an Australian man who knows little of his family’s background, receives a call from the past that changes everything he thought he knew, and who he thought he was.”
Rest assured, the show has two intermissions and playwright S. Shakthidharan, known as Shakthi, explains that’s not just for bathroom breaks but to dissect the intensity of what you’re watching. He was in conversation with fellow Sri Lankan expatriate Tanya Selvaratnam and talked about the revolutionary nature of diaspora storytelling:
“As part of the condition of being a migrant, we just perform,” he said. “Behind closed doors, if we’re lucky, we show who we really are. This play is a way for us to say, ‘Here we fucking are. This is us.’”
That takes time. For both an audience of insiders—migrants, children of migrants, like myself—as we grasp for the familiar and the magic of theater bridges the living rooms of our childhoods onto the one onstage. For outsiders, the mundane of the everyday are teased out to breed familiarity, from the installation of an air conditioner to falling in love over math equations and seesaws to a matriarch’s struggle to keep politics off the dinner table. Eventually, even war-torn Sri Lanka can feel just like us.
