Rice Boy Cover.indd - Stratford Festival

A Profile of Sunil
Kuruvilla
by Mark Bly
Below | ArAyA MengeshA (toMMy) And AnitA MAjuMdAr (tinA) in reheArsAl;
AnAnd rAjArAM (fish seller) And, in bAckground, director guillerMo VerdecchiA
Facing Page, From toP | (froM left) AnAnd rAjArAM, AshA VijAyAsinghAM (serVAnt
girl), sAM Moses (grAndfAther) And guillerMo VerdecchiA; ArAyA MengeshA And
guillerMo VerdecchiA; sAM Moses (in bAckground) And rAoul bhAnejA (fAther)
PhotogrAPhy by richArd bAin
In the mid 1990s I encountered Sunil Kuruvilla
as a writer in the Yale School of Drama graduate
playwriting program. Sunil had previously been
mentored by such luminaries as Anthony Minghella
and Alistair MacLeod. His writerly pedigree was
impressive, even intimidating, as viewed from my
narrow perch as the chair of the program. What,
as his new mentor, could I possibly have to say to
Sunil that could compete with the mentoring of my
predecessors?
Late in his first semester, I gave Sunil and other
students in his class an exercise. The students were
asked by me to come into my office and to select a
single image from about fifty art and photography
books. They were told to take that image and
imagine that each of them was inside the image
conducting a “sensory walkabout,” encountering that
landscape in it in a sensory way: smelling, seeing,
listening, touching, breathing, tasting that world.
They were each to report back, as explorers of their
individual worlds, what they had discovered, either
in prose or in play form. I underscored that they
need not worry about creating a plot or characters,
but that each of them should focus in an unfiltered
way how he or she had experienced their image’s
inner world.
A week later in class the students read aloud
to the rest of us their sensory responses. Sunil
wrote in response to an image he had found in
the late Spalding Gray’s photo book In Search of
the Monkey Girl, a collection of tales and photos
about those shadowy figures who inhabit the
exotic world of travelling carnivals. The image Sunil
picked was of a “Popeye” figure, a carney sideshow
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