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Counting and Cracking Is a Joyous Generational Square-off
Plus a smart new play, ‘The Ask,’ at the Wild Project.
Siddhartha — a college student in Sydney who considers himself Australian, goes by Sid, and can’t speak Tamil — is the heir to a complicated history that stretches back to and beyond his great-grandfather, Apah (Prakash Belawadi), a Cambridge-educated mathematician and trade minister in the Ceylon parliament during what were, at least for families with big houses and liberal ideals, the halcyon days between Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain in 1948 and the civil war that erupted in 1983. It is the hard choice.” While generational tension is surely unique to no particular time, our present is shot through with some undeniably blistering friction between a younger cohort that hunger for progress on their own terms — who are fluent in the language of trauma and long to exorcize it openly — and their elders, whose every ounce of cultural training directs them away from the therapeutic and toward the self-reliant and assimilationist. A perfect fit for Wild Project’s little-but-fierce stage — and an antidote to the glib sensationalism of Job — The Ask unfolds over 80 real-time minutes in the intimidatingly nice Upper West Side apartment of Greta (Betsy Aidem), a longtime donor to the ACLU who’s no longer certain that the organization — now represented by sincere, nonbinary, and Brooklyn-coded zillennial Tanner (Colleen Litchfield) — still upholds the values she’s supported with her checkbook.
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