Rice Boy Cover.indd - Stratford Festival

Sunil Kuruvilla – playwright
A finalist for a Governor
General’s Literary Award,
Sunil Kuruvilla graduated
from the Yale School of
Drama’s playwriting program.
His work has been produced
at many theatres including
the Yale Repertory Theatre,
the Mark Taper Forum,
the La Jolla Playhouse
and the Canadian Stage
Company. Sunil has been writer-in-residence at
many institutions, most recently at the University
of Guelph. He has also written screenplays for
CTV and Showtime. Sunil’s many outstanding
teachers have included Robert Blacker, Mark Bly,
Liz Diamond, Alistair MacLeod, Donald Margulies
and the late Anthony Minghella. His awards
include the Truman Capote Literary Fellowship
and the Cole Porter ASCAP (American Society
of Composers and Performers) Award. He has
been generously and steadily supported by the
Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council.
Sunil lives in Waterloo with his wife, Lisa, and son,
Isaac, and works at Wilfrid Laurier University.
The Kolam
In South India, early each morning, women grind
rice then use the resulting powder to create
elaborate kolams or patterns on their front porch
that disappear within hours. Originally a Hindu
cultural practice, now adopted by others, the
creation and destruction of the kolam enacts the
struggle to find pattern and stillness amidst the
flux of life.
The following artists
participated in readings
of the play.
deena Aziz
robert blacker
ian deakin
roop gill
ravi jain
keira loughran
Anita Majumdar
Monique Mojica
rahnuma Panthaky
sarena Parmer
imali Perera
Anand rajaram
Vik sahay
Pamela sinha
sanjay talwar
Marc tellez
isaac thomas
guillermo Verdecchia
ian Watson
Ideas and Insights
A Script Revisited
ArcelorMittal applauds the artists, artisans and staff behind every
outstanding experience at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
In May 2008, the artistic staff at the Stratford
Shakespeare Festival staged a reading of Rice Boy to
hear the play as they considered it for production,
giving me an opportunity to revisit a work I had
been away from for years.
I wrote the first draft in 1996 when I left home
to study playwriting in the United States. After
countless revisions, the play was produced in 2000,
and other productions followed. Initially, I wrote the
play without ambition, to just combat homesickness;
the story is set in Waterloo, the place where I grew
up and now live, and Kottayam, the place where I
spent some childhood summers. Character, dialogue
and images sped into my head, the call of the Fish
Seller, the aroma of the Harmony Lunch restaurant, a
mix of memory and invention.
Minutes into the reading last year, I found myself
making notes in the script, cringing at some of my
youthful writing. Fortunately for me, the theatre
decided to include the play in its season. This past
year, friends have stopped me at the grocery store
to congratulate me on having a play at Stratford; this
production is an honour, but more importantly, it let
me make an old play new. One of the big changes
I made – the grandmother in the play has been
replaced by a grandfather – gives the story a sad
symmetry, as now three generations of men in the
same family have lost the women they love and are
devastated.
I don’t know why my work on this play continued
to be speedy (but on others goes slowly). Certainly
my collaborators played a role throughout. Earlier, I
worked with Mark Bly, Liz Diamond, Chay Yew and
Iris Turcott to build the story. This time, I worked
with Robert Blacker and Guillermo Verdecchia; they
supported all my changes and offered many wise
suggestions. I am proud and humbled, as I like what
the script is now but know that I did not write it by
myself.
sunil kuruvilla
Playwright
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