Rheology
- Written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury
- In collaboration with Bulbul Chakraborty
Shayok Misha Chowdhury is an Obie and Whiting Award winning writer and director. He directed the premiere of his playwriting debut, Public Obscenities (NYT Critic’s Pick; Soho Rep, NAATCO, Woolly Mammoth, TFANA), one of three finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Misha’s many-tentacled practice, spanning theater, music, poetry, and film, has earned him The Relentless Award, The Mark O’Donnell Prize, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Princess Grace Award, a Jonathan Larson Grant, two Sundance fellowships, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Recent: Prince Faggot (NYT Critic’s Pick; Playwrights Horizons, Soho Rep). Up next: Gospel at Colonus (Little Island).
Bulbul Chakraborty is a theoretical physicist, recognized for her contributions to soft condensed matter theory, studying systems far from equilibrium, such as granular materials, amorphous systems, and statistical physics. She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a recipient of a Simons Fellowship. Born in India, Bulbul also grew up singing Rabindrasangeet: Bengali writer-composer Rabindranath Tagore’s repertoire of songs about the natural world. She has performed in concert with Misha at Lincoln Center and Little Island. An alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, Bulbul immigrated to the U.S. in 1974 to get her Ph.D from Stonybrook. She was the first tenured woman physicist at Brandeis University, where she is the Ancell Professor of Physics and former Head of the Division of Science. You are likely to find her singing loudly in her office.
Presenting the The Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater Company production of
Rheology
In Rheology, Shayok Misha Chowdhury joins forces with his physicist mother, Bulbul Chakraborty. Bulbul is obsessed with the mystery of sand: how it flows like a liquid, but then jams into a solid. Misha is obsessed with his mother. But they’re running out of time. In this boundary-pushing collaboration, an artist son and his scientist mother challenge each other to a high-stakes experiment.
For a promising artist in New York theater, Rheology feels like a special new intervention in the sandbox [Chowdhury] has claimed for his exploration.
Chowdhury’s staging is as lucid as an oratorio. He perfectly sets up each actor for bravura solos that make their group scenes feel lushly choral.