Radhika Mudaliyar, Nadie Kammallaweera, and Kaivalya Suvarna in Counting and Cracking. Photo: Pia Johnson.

There’s a four-hour, two-part French movie I saw fifteen years ago, about the life of bank robber Jacques Mesrine, that’s stayed with me. The filmmaking was so strong, so self-assured, that a few minutes in I knew that not only would I love every second of the film but I would leave wanting more. That’s exactly the feeling I had after the first few minutes of Counting and Cracking, now playing at NYU Skirball through September 22. It was a feeling of bliss—and it lasted the entire three and a half hours of this marvelous epic.

Counting and Cracking tells the story of Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar), a college-age Australian of Sri Lankan descent, and his mother, Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera), who emigrated right before her son was born. She is consternated by his Australian identity; he is frustrated by her silence about her past. Siddhartha falls in love with Lily (Abbie-lee Lewis) and becomes curious about his family history—even more so when his father, Thirru (Antonythasan Jesuthasan), imprisoned and presumed dead for twenty years, turns up alive.

This family drama is artfully intertwined with Radha’s history, starting the day after her birth in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Her grandfather Apah (Prakash Belawadi), a cabinet minister, is at odds with his party’s decision to adopt Sinhala (instead of English) as Sri Lanka’s official language because he feels it will marginalize the Tamil-speaking population. “Two languages, one country. One language, two countries,” he prophesies.

The play speeds through thirty years of Sri Lankan history and we see Apah’s prediction come true as political violence rips the country apart. When an outspoken twenty-one-year-old Radha (Radhika Mudaliyar) declares she will break with tradition and marry young Thirru (Kaivalya Suvarna) for love, violence and corruption have already spread throughout the country; Thirru’s sister has joined the radical and violent Tamil Tigers. Six years later, when the country erupts in riots targeting the Tamil population, Thirru is arrested and Radha is forced to flee to Australia.

Language is central to Counting and Cracking. The first lines of the play are in Sinhala and Tamil, translated into English by actors watching the action, an inventive and effective theatrical convention that allows characters to express themselves authentically throughout the play without excluding the (mostly English-speaking) audience. Language figures into the plot, too: It is what separates Siddhartha, who doesn’t speak Tamil, from his mother and his heritage. It is at the heart of the conflict in postcolonial Sri Lanka, as Sri Lanka’s repressive government uses language to divide the population and retain power. And then there is the play’s language: lyrical, sharp, and often funny.

Playwright/associate director S. Shakthidharan and director/associate playwright Eamon Flack pack an awful lot of political and social history into their play, but even the information-laden second act always feels dramatic. The play rushes by—so much so that it is sometimes difficult to understand what characters are saying. But even if the individual brush strokes are obscured, the piece as a whole comes together.

This is an epic to be sure, but to view it only through that lens is to miss half the play. For all the work’s ambitious scope, Counting and Cracking never loses sight of the familial ties that power the story. In fact, it is Shakthidharan and Flack’s merging of the personal and the political that powers the play’s success. When twenty-one-year-old Radha chains herself to her grandfather because “weddings are more important than politics” (he sagely advises, “It’s not a protest until you know your demands”), she gets Apah’s friend/political adversary Vinsanda to agree to put politics aside. But politics is personal, and the conflict between the two rivals persists, eventually killing Apah and separating Radha from her husband.

There is so much to love in this production. I’ll start with the performances, which. are uniformly great. Standouts include Palekar and Lewis as the contemporary lovers and Kammallaweera and Mudaliyar as older and younger Radha. But singling out individual actors misses the truly collaborative nature of the play. That’s a credit to the directing team, which can also take a bow for the wonderfully playful and imaginative staging devices that populate the first act, each bit topping the one before and reaching a pinnacle with an air conditioner installation, as well as the powerful dramatic moments in the second and third acts.

Dale Ferguson, who also did the fine costume design along with Anandavalli, gives us a minimal and practical set , providing helpful time and place markers for each scene and a lot of space for the sixteen actors and three musicians. The lighting, by Damien Cooper, works well in the magnificent new Skirball space. Stefan Gregory fills out the production with artfully crafted music and sound design.

Despite the importance of language, what is unsaid is the play is strongest. Shakthidharan and Flack utilize subtext like a surgeon uses a scalpel. And that brings me back to that moment when I knew I was going to enjoy myself. It was in the second scene, when Siddhartha and Lily are talking about political systems and personal histories and I realized they hadn’t mentioned that they are at a party, or that they are high, or that they just met, or that they are falling in love, though by the end of the achingly beautiful scene all these things are apparent. Artists who respect me as an audience member earn my trust. And when you’re settling in for a long play, it’s great to know you’re in good hands.