Uncivil Performances: National Politics of the Sri Lankan Theater Space

Abstract

The 2016 performance of Dutu Thena Allanu (Wanted) by Kaushalya Fernando in the Ediriweera Sarachchandra Open-Air Theater, at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, was brought to a halt, mid-performance, by a violent crowd in the audience that determined the play to be inappropriate for such a “sacred” performance space. Better known as “Wala,” the Ediriweera Sarachchandra Open-Air Theater is considered unique and unlike any other performance space in Sri Lanka primarily due to its origins being tied to the playwright and dramatist Ediriweera Sarachchandra whose plays, such as Maname (1956) and Sinhabahu (1961), hold an unparalleled significance within the new patriotic discursive and theatrical re-performance of quintessential Sri Lankan postcolonial theater. In this study, I examine how this re-signification of “Sarachchandralatory” (what G. A Haththotuwegama terms the unique adulation and aggrandization of Sarachchandra and his work) allows for the self-proclaimed custodians of the performance space to solidify patriarchal politics of the contemporary Sinhala Buddhist nation state. With the 2016 performance of Dutu Thena Allanu by Kaushalya Fernando in Wala as a case study, the paper investigates how Wala is a site of struggle where the spatialization of the gendered, anticolonial nationalist, historical past of Sri Lanka manifests in gatekeeping mechanisms that continue to delegitimize women’s postcolonial work, narratives of sexuality, and their critiques of the male-authored nation as “uncivil.” It further examines how Dutu Thena, in spite and on account of being violently intervened, can be read as Fernando’s exegesis of ethnotionalist politics that govern not only the politics of the performance space but also the hegemonic history of Sri Lankan postcolonial theater that peripheralizes the Gendered and the ethnic Other.