Theater review by Billy McEntee
Not everyone’s mother is a theoretical physicist, and if yours is, she’s probably not as convincing an actress as Bulbul Chakraborty. Toward the start of Rheology—a play in which she co-stars with her son, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, who also wrote and directed it—Chakraborty leads the audience through a lecture on solids and liquids, but partway through it she starts coughing, then choking. On the night I attended, an audience member asked if she was okay; another told her to put her hands over her head to open her lungs. That’s when Chakraborty stopped choking—and flashed the audience a mischievous smile.
Rheology | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
So begins a series of scenarios, from quietly poetic to deliberately melodramatic, in which Chowdhury imagines and confronts his mother’s death, using Rheology to address his fears through a language that he and his mother both understand: experiments. She’s a scientist, he’s a theatermaker, and though their fields may seem light years apart, they share obsessions with questions, curiosity and play. Chakraborty’s work is in rheology—the study of the flow of matter—and focuses on sand. In one affecting scene, Chowdhury plays in a sandbox alone before digging up a sieve, a castle mold and finally, deeper down, the bones of a skeleton; at that moment, on Chakraborty's nearby lab table, an hourglass drops its final grain. But then, Chakraborty—who has the charm of your favorite high school teacher—turns the hourglass over, resetting it.
Rheology | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
Rheology articulates the existential conflict between parent and child: finite time, infinite love. The play succeeds because of its deep embrace of death’s antithesis, liveness, both in the introductory lecture—when audience members can chime in with their own thoughts and observations—and the science-inspired explorations that follow. Experiments, like theater, are highly variable; the constant is Chakraborty and Chowdhury’s devotion to their crafts and to each other, and to exploring how those two things can meet. At one point, Chakraborty shares a peer’s analysis of sand grains, which “hold together even as they come apart from themselves.” Such material is fragile, but also flexible; it constantly rearranges. It’s a state that Chakraborty explains to her son and wishes, with tears in her eyes, that he will experience when she’s gone.
Rheology. Playwrights Horizons (Off Broadway). By Shayok Misha Chowdhury with Bulbul Chakraborty. Directed by Chowdhury. With Chakraborty, Chowdhury. Running time: 1hr 30mins. No intermission.
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Rheology | Photograph: Courtesy Maria Baranova
