If you ever happen to find yourself entered in a competition with a young man named Sunil Kuruvilla, here's a cautionary word of advice: withdraw.
Quit, surrender, concede defeat and find yourself another game. Because it's virtually certain that Kuruvilla will win. He always does.
Let me give you a few examples. When he was 10 years old, he entered a short-story contest sponsored by the United Nations. There were 20,000 entries from 150 countries. Care to guess whose submission won?
Some years later, when Kuruvilla was attending Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., a friend suggested that they take a play-writing workshop at Queen's University. Kuruvilla had never written a play -- he fashioned himself a prose writer -- but agreed. Three days before the workshop began, he got a call from its leader, dramatist Sharon Pollock, reminding him to bring along his play. Of course, there wasn't one, so he spent the next 24 hours writing a full-length script. Six months later, that play, Fight of the Century,won a Shaw Festival competition to commemorate its silver anniversary.
Oh, and then there was his application to Yale Drama School, arguably the most prestigious writing program of its kind on the continent. About 650 people applied; Yale chose three, Kuruvilla among them. In fact, he was admitted twice. The first time, he had to waive acceptance because he didn't have enough money to finance the three-year program. Yale would not offer a deferment, so he had to apply again.
Of course, despite these competitive victories, there's a good chance you have not yet heard of Sunil Kuruvilla. That, I suspect, is about to change.
Last night, Toronto's Factory Theatre opened Fighting Words -- it's the first time his work has been mounted in Canada (the play runs to Dec. 9). But his plays have been staged or workshopped in the United States 15 times in the past two years, and now every company in North American seems eager to commission the 35-year-old, Ottawa-born playwright -- including the Joseph Papp Public Theatre of New York, South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa, Calif., and Philadelphia's Wilma Theatre. In fact, these commitments prompted him to turn down, for the moment, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and Toronto's Canadian Stage; the latter has an option on another Kuruvilla script, Rice Boy,a coming-of-age story about a motherless Indian youth in Canada.
Much of the recent interest in Kuruvilla's work was sparked by the Yale Repertory Company's world premiere of Rice Boy last year, which drew a glowing notice from Bruce Weber of The New York Times. "Mr. Kuruvilla," he wrote, "has supplied a witty, cross-cultural script that is particularly charming in its presentation of a contemporary Indian family, its exoticism viewed with real affection and presented with real romance." It was only the second time in 20 years that Yale's main stage had chosen to produce a play by one of its own graduates.
Set in Wales, Fighting Words is about two fictional sisters, Peg and Nia, sparring for the affection of a small-town hero, boxer Johnny Owen. In 1980, the real-life Owen, known as the Merthyr Matchstick -- he was only 5-foot-8 and weighed 115 pounds -- fought a match in Los Angeles against Lupe Pintor. Knocked out in the 12th round, Owen went into a coma and died 45 days later. Kuruvilla had actually seen a rebroadcast of the fight on television, and for 17 years had kept a file on deaths incurred from boxing (more than 600).
As in Fight of the Century,which has heavyweight pugilist Joe Louis at its margin, Kuruvilla uses a public figure to examine the lives of characters and communities. "I was looking for a new way to tell the story, and finally it dawned on me to tell it using women, to look at boxing from their perspective." The character of Owen never actually appears in the play.
The playwright's interest in the sport is more than dramaturgical. At 16, trying to impress "the girl next door," he joined a local gym in Waterloo and started to box, training with people such as former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis. (He didn't get the girl.)
His parents, both academics, actively discouraged him, but he would lie and say he was going to the library. "I always joked that I was a very good defensive fighter because I could never come home with a black eye."
He continued to box through college, even choosing to do a postgraduate program in creative writing at the University of Windsor, instead of at the University of British Columbia, because it was closer to Detroit, where the famous Kronk Gym was located.
As an amateur, tall, rangy Kuruvilla says, he was hard to beat. "I make a distinction between a boxer and a fighter, and I was a boxer. I had a good jab and I was tough to hit."
At Windsor, he studied under novelist Alistair MacLeod, who says Kuruvilla showed a maturity beyond his years, was thoughtful and eloquent and had a lot of talent. "He had a good, good centre to him. I'm very glad he stayed with it, because a lot of writers get tired of battering their head against whatever. He stayed with his dream."
Despite the apparent ease with which Kuruvilla has begun to establish his name, writing plays, he insists, is "very difficult. Each one is its own puzzle. Every time I start a new play, I have to learn how to write all over again, it seems; self-doubt is constant. Discovering the characters and the story they inhabit continues to be a wonderful struggle, but a struggle nonetheless. Real skill lies in the revising -- my rationalization given that Fighting Words is now into its 98th draft -- and I still find it difficult balancing mystery with clarity."
He says his willingness to revise derives in part from a recognition that once a play becomes public, "they're not my words any more. You have to let it go. It's difficult, but necessary." In Factory's production of Fighting Words,he adds, the two lead actors (Jody Stevens and Irene Poole) actually "knew more about the place than I did," travelling to Wales and interviewing Owen's parents, among others.
After taking his master's degree in arts, Kuruvilla spent several years writing scripts and teaching at Laurier. At one point, he attended a screenwriting program in Ottawa led by director Anthony Minghella ( Truly, Madly, Deeply and The English Patient). Minghella apparently was impressed and wrote a glowing reference that eventually helped Kuruvilla to gain admission to Yale.
"He told me that one day, he'd be sitting in a theatre watching my work," Kuruvilla recalls. "And I was just a guy who at that point had not done anything. It still fires me up."
Other major leaguers also have advanced his career, including Yale Repertory director Liz Diamond and playwright Edwin Sanchez; the latter hooked up the young writer with his own New York agent, Wendy Streeter.
Kuruvilla says he isn't sure exactly when he became more interested in drama than in prose. He does know that he was willing to abandon a full-time job for a chance to study at Yale, a program that cost him $100,000. His heart was so set on Yale that he actually spurned a full scholarship for a comparable program at New York University. His parents encouraged him and helped to finance his education.
At one point, some years earlier, Kuruvilla had mused out loud about studying law, fearing that he would never earn a living as a writer. "No," his parents said, rather atypically, "you have to write. That's what you're meant to do."
Among the commissioned work he is now writing is a play about a Vietnam War draft dodger who returns home to Wisconsin from Canada, after Jimmy Carter's presidential pardon, and finds himself an immigrant. And he's been commissioned by Showtime, a U.S. cable channel, to write a screen version of Fighting Words.
Play-writing, of course, isn't a winner-take-all profession. But, just in case, consider yourself warned: Sunil Kuruvilla likes to compete. And as far as I can tell, he has yet to lose. Fighting Words runs until Dec. 9 at the Factory Theatre, Toronto. For more information, call: 416-504-9971.