By Laura Collins-Hughes

The playwright S. Shakthidharan has lived in Australia since he was a toddler, but when he speaks of his homeland, he means Sri Lanka.

That’s where he was born, where he spent his first birthday, and where his ancestors were rooted. Then in 1983, the South Asian nation descended into what would become a 26-year civil war. His family, part of the country’s Tamil minority, had the means to flee to safety. So they did, going to India, Singapore and finally Australia, in 1984.

“I do think of Sri Lanka as my homeland, but I think of Australia as my home,” he said the other day, his accent redolent of Sydney, where he grew up. “I think I carry the two simultaneously. Sri Lanka lives somewhere in my chest. Always. Wherever I am.”

He was saying this in New York, after a rehearsal of his epic play, ‘Counting and Cracking’, in which the personal and political are inextricably entwined. Jet lag had a hold of him, but he was game to talk about the show, which has a largely South Asian cast of 19 and a running time of three and a half hours (intermissions included).

An autobiographically infused hit in Australia, where it had its premiere in 2019, it is now in previews at NYU Skirball in Greenwich Village. Produced by Belvoir St Theatre and Kurinji, and presented by the Public Theatre and NYU Skirball, it’s a multigenerational saga about a Sri Lankan-Australian family and the dangerous fragmenting of a society that can drive people to leave their beloved country and risk trying to forge a new life elsewhere.

Shakthidharan, who goes by Shakthi, was already deep into the making of ‘Counting and Cracking’ when he learned his own family’s story of living in and leaving Sri Lanka — knowledge that transformed the script, the playwright and his relationship with his mother.

“This play is like my soul on a plate,” he said.

It opens in 2004 with a Sri Lankan-Australian college student named Siddhartha (fully assimilated, he goes by Sid) and his vigilant mother, Radha, scattering a relative’s ashes in the Georges River in Sydney. Radha mentions to the attending Hindu priest that she has had the ashes of another beloved family member under her bed for 21 years, ever since she emigrated.

The ashes are, on the one hand, a freighted metaphor, and on the other a real-life detail: Shakthidharan’s mother kept his grandmother’s ashes in that same spot for 21 years.

Like many immigrant parents, his mother, Anandavalli, strongly encouraged him to assimilate in their adopted country, and he did. A Bharatanatyam dancer, she also surrounded him with Tamil arts and culture, yet he was unschooled in Sri Lankan political history and his family’s own past. When he reached his late 20s and started asking her about that — wanting to better understand himself, thinking he might create a play out of it — she shut him down with a vehemence he hadn’t expected.

As she explained in an interview, she wasn’t ready then to discuss what happened to a nation that she remembers as almost idyllic and still sometimes calls by its colonial name.

“Even today, I think I find it very difficult to talk about it,” she said. “It was never in the context of my soul or my heart to live anywhere but in Ceylon.”

So Shakthidharan, who hadn’t been back to Sri Lanka until he started working on ‘Counting and Cracking’, spent five or six years doing research for the play by listening to other Sri Lankans, in Sydney and around the world.

Only later did he understand what kind of pain he had been asking his mother to revisit in talking about Sri Lanka. Figuratively speaking, he said, “I was saying to her, ‘Hey, can we, like, pull the ashes out from under the bed, open up the urn and go through it?’”

Performed in English, Tamil and Sinhalese, ‘Counting and Cracking’ is Shakthidharan’s first play, and its scale is vast. But Eamon Flack, its director — who is also credited as associate writer, while Shakthidharan is also credited as associate director — said the show found its size organically.

“We made a deal, I guess, really early on, which is that we would only do it if we could do it properly,” Flack said. “And that meant, as we worked on it, rather than it getting smaller and more doable, it became bigger and less doable.”

Assembling the production’s international cast took four years, he recalled, involving multiple trips to Sri Lanka and India, and following leads from “friends of friends of friends saying, ‘Oh, I know this guy in Paris,’ and, ‘Oh, you really should talk to this person in Bangalore or in Pondicherry.’”

When they did the first full workshop, it was Flack’s idea to invite Anandavalli — on “a hunch that she had something to offer the process,” he said. It was in the rehearsal room, answering dramaturgical questions that she began talking about family history that her son had never heard before.

After protecting herself from those memories so assiduously for so long, she said, “The tears started coming with ‘Counting and Cracking.’”

Suddenly, Shakthidharan had a torrent of information about his own origin story, and a far better sense of his mother, his family, and his homeland.

Anandavalli joined the production as choreographer, and costume and cultural adviser. The play, which Shakthidharan had begun based on stories from his community, grew significantly more personal, its mother-son arc becoming one of healing and reconciliation.

When it had its acclaimed premiere in Sydney, he was struck by an insight that has changed him.

“I realized that as migrants,” he said, “we are only ever our full selves behind closed doors. Either with our family or our close friends, we bring the Western part of ourselves and the homeland part of ourselves together, and we operate as what we really are. And mostly in public life, we mask. Like we put on a version of how to be Australian.”

His mother had raised him to know that Western thought and culture were not the be-all and end-all.

“But the world I moved in, it was everything,” he said. “So you make a decision never to tell anyone. You step into rooms and you say, ‘Yeah, Western life is it.’ You don’t tell them about what your life is like at home. You don’t tell them about this other completely, fundamentally different way of thinking about everything. You go into every room going, how do I fit in?”

He doesn’t do that anymore, though; he believes it’s counterproductive to expect migrants “to discard parts of themselves” in deference to conformity.

With ‘Counting and Cracking’,’ he took the opposite tack, offering his whole Eastern-Western soul for thousands to see — and the play was a mainstream success, embraced as part of the Australian story.

This is when Shakthidharan, at long last, first started to feel like he belonged there.

-New York Times