Rheology

The Bushwick Starr presents
a co-production with HERE and Ma-Yi
RHEOLOGY
Written and Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury
in collaboration with Bulbul Chakraborty

Obie Award-winning writer/director Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s recent play, Public Obscenities, is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and was singled out as one of the best theater works of 2023 by The New Yorker. His newest work, RHEOLOGY, is a performance memoir created and performed with his mother, the physicist Bulbul Chakraborty. Chakraborty’s specialty is the titular science of rheology, the laws governing the malleability and movement of matter under force. Another of her loves is the poetic songs of Bengali composer Rabindranath Tagore. These songs paint glorious pictures about the drama of nature: monsoons produce drum-like thunder claps, rivers let loose their long hair into waterfalls, music flows through generations. Chakraborty learned these songs from her foremothers, then passed them on to Misha. In this production, an artist son studies his physicist mother while she studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science and perform the story of how things flow.