The Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan’s Counting and Cracking, produced by the Public Theater in New York, is a sweeping, multigenerational, and multilingual family epic (it runs nearly three-and-a-half hours, and the mostly South Asian cast delivers the story in English, Tamil, and Sinhalese), but it is also the story of how democracy and pluralism came apart in Shakthidharan’s native Sri Lanka, where his grandfather served as a cabinet minister before the civil war that wracked the country from 1983 until 2009.
Anand caught up with Shakthidharan this week after seeing the play performed, and the two talked about how he came to write the story, what he learned while researching his family’s history and deep connection with the history of Sri Lankan democracy, and what the play has to tell us about the current American political condition and how quickly a society can find itself turning the corner from neighbors to enemies.
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