My first question for playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury and his mother physicist, Bulbul Chakraborty– which appears together in RheologyA beautiful and disarming 75 -minute meditation on mortality and family at Bushwick Starr until May 10 – was simple: How did the devil have led your mom in this area?
On the one hand, as I learned in a conversation with Chowdhury and Chakraborty at the Brooklyn Theater intimate, she needed very little persuasion, because the two had interpreted Rabira Sangeet (songs of the great poet Bengali Rabindhenath Tagore) as part of a part of a HereIn a room that initially took shape as a kind of concert / memory. And certainly, his history as a speaker on physics gave him some comfort and experience in the appearance before an audience.
In fact, it looks like it was Chowdhury himself – whose game Public obscenitiesfirst Soho Rep in 2023then to Theater for a new audience last yearImmediately announced him as a major talent for dramatic writing and made him a finalist from Pulitzer – who needed Cajoleurs to put himself on stage.
“After Public obscenitiesI felt a little reluctant, “said Chowdhury.” I said to myself, do I really want to do this bizarre and semi-autoproductive thing with three theaters? “(In addition to here Arts Center and Bushwick Starr, Ma-Yi Theater Company is co-producer of Rheology.) After years of work in experimental theater and performance, in other words, Chowdhury estimated that he had leveled himself for “dramatic writing with a C” and “no role of me really wanted to play in a thing”.
But over time, he began to realize that trying to make the residence here with “just a good old -fashioned concert” was not going to cut it. Her mother was getting old (in fact, she will soon retire her post to University of Brandeis), and his feelings about their relationship changed.
“I realized that I could not repel it,” said Chowdhury, who is 40 years old. “I said to myself, my mother and I will be able to sing as well as we have been singing for two years? There may not be one – who knows …”
He walked away before this sentence reached his morbid conclusion. It is less reluctant in the show itself, in which Misha on stage says it in this way:
Recently … I really felt like … or I felt it quite in a sharp way, that the time my mother and I left together is over. And I have always had a phobia of my mother's death. Before I start this process, I would have had trouble saying these words aloud, saying “the death of my mother”. So I guess we are making progress.
So, with dates on the calendar and a reserved place, he had the impression that he should “take advantage of this opportunity, even if it is difficult to do at the moment. This process made us realize, as we built: Oh, that's a bit of what the show is. “”
Before he went to more theatrical and self-reflective passages involving both the mother and the son, Rheology Starts with a conference on the physics of sand by Chakraborty, on the basis of the conferences she has been doing for decades. Indeed, she admitted to me that the most difficult thing about working on the series with her dramatic son was not the game or the song – it gave in control of this opening.
“The most difficult part of this conversation was to give up writing the conversation,” said Chakraborty, a thoughtful woman with animated and attentive eyes and a ready smile. Or, as Chowdhury said, “my mother struggled to be the person responsible in this process.”
On stage RheologyIt must be said that Chakraborty has a remarkable presence on stage, both in conference passages and in more recitative and personal monologues, which is particularly impressive since his only previous experience on stage was in a song contest at university and, briefly, as a interpreter and translator recruited for a Hindi piece because it was current (in addition to its main language).
Her real performance on performance occurred many years ago, she said, her thesis advisor, who helped her spend a first period during which, she said, “my talks were bad.” What explained, she explained, it is the practice of her adviser to “make the public move a little every day before my arrival, so that I had to speak stronger and be more coherent”. As she made her post-doctoral student, she said, she had people who told her that she gave “great discussions”. To judge by the generous commitment of the preview that I saw Rheology With last week, this is a fair examination.
For the part of Chowdhury, it took years of work on stage, including an MFA in Columbia, to overcome its innate introversion. Speaking for both, he said: “None of us is particularly comfortable in our body, nor are people of natural-to-be of people. We are shy and worried. So there was a kind of finding us thanks to performance in performance. ”
Ironically, the only member of the family who was an interpreter for life is not on stage: Chowdhury's father and Chakraborty's husband, Partha Chowdhury – whose day work is also as a physics teacher, In Umass– has already worked with his son on creative projects and recorded a crucial voiceover used in Public obscenities. Family members' recordings were a little unlikely by the line of the manufacture of Chowdhury, in fact: the sprawling but strongly concentrated Public obscenitiesAn epic of three hours of Chékhovian details and to go beyond humanism, had its roots in a vocal memo chowdhury made of his uncle talking to him of a particularly alive dream. Likewise Rheology At heart a kind of family recording: Chakraborty's mother, at 91, singing a tagore song on a waterfall and an avalanche.
When part of this video plays for RheologyAnd Chakraborty sings with the image of her own deceased mother, she is visibly moved. “Emotion comes right,” she told me. The same goes for a living memory: “My mother made me dance on this poem when I was 6 years old – she designed all this room where the sun arrives. I was the sun and my sister was the waterfall. On the terrace of our house, day after day, we did it. ”
This ritual, joined by other family members, became even more central after the death of the father of Chakraborty when she was only 23 years old. “This is how we meet,” recalls Chakraborty.
The ritual performance to treat life in the face of death seems to be a family tradition. In MukhagniIn the 2020s under the Festival Radar, Chowdhury and his partner, Kameron Neal, considered and repeated their own bodily death with a show they called “A fallthography.” Chowdhury's credit in this play was “director and script architect” because he had incorporated Neal's equipment in a way of the way he collected and organized his mother's words for Rheology (Although credit this time can be seen as follows: “Written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury in collaboration with Bulbul Chakraborty.”)
I admit that I am always stuck on the abnormal wonder of this collaboration. What does it do to make a show, not just about Your mother – a trade stock for many playwrights, often with an ax to grind – with Your mother? Chowdhury says it gently and thoughtally.
“The process has been, can we really take the disciplines of the other seriously and not reduce it to a simple metaphor?” If I take the dramaturgy of my mother's research seriously, can I make a new type of theater from the way she really works? Is there anything on the real physics of sand that can information of how we structure a piece of theater? ”
At the intersection of science and performance is a common concept: experience. If, as the Misha says on stage, his hypothesis is essentially that he cannot imagine life without her mother – that if she dies, he too will die – what would he mean to test this hypothesis in a piece of experimental theater?
“For me, it's very real,” said Chakraborty. “When I enter the rehearsals, the way everything works reminds me when I enter the laboratory of an experimental colleague. I am a bit of a stranger there; they do not let me touch things. There, they try to understand, what experience can they design? Or they would say: Well, that we cannot measure.”
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he / he) is the editor-in-chief of American theater.
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