“Rheology” begins with a physicist delivering a lecture about sand, with a blackboard full of equations, and equipment (hourglass, sandbox, projections) to illustrate her points. This goes on for a full twenty minutes. It’s only when she chokes on the dust-smoke from one of her demonstrations, and drops dead, that “Rheology” becomes a more obvious work of theater, albeit never a conventional one.
“I felt really anxious as soon as you started to cough,” a man suddenly says from the audience. “I was like: What happens if somebody actually calls 911, and then an ambulance shows up in the middle of this show.”
Eventually the man introduces himself as playwright and director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, and introduces us to Bulbul Chakraborty, who is an actual physicist, and his actual mother.
“Rheology,” it turns out, is a two-character work of theater driven by Chowdhury’s anxiety; specifically: “I’ve always had a phobia of my mother’s death… If you were to die, I would just die too.”
So the play is ostensibly designed in collaboration with his scientist mother to test that hypothesis. The result is a sometimes brain-stretching exercise in physics and family. It takes a while to see any connection between Chakraborty’s straightforward scientific facts about sand and Chowdhury’s evocative stagecraft about…mortality? His relationship with his mother? His relationship to theater?
As he demonstrated in “Public Obscenities,” his much acclaimed play which was half in Bengali, Chowdhury is not afraid to present material that is unfamiliar to most of his audience.
By complete coincidence, on the subway ride to the Bushwick Starr to see the play, I happened to read what turned out to be a relevant newspaper article with the headline Man Sinks in Quicksand and Emerges With a Girlfriend. The article explains that the longtime friend he was with dialed 911 to report that her “boyfriend” was in quicksand; which was the first time she had identified him that way. But it might have made me a bit more receptive to the mysteries of sand that I hadn’t much thought about, and that are Chakraborty’s life work as a physicist. She asks us to consider: Is sand a liquid or a solid? Sometimes it holds its shape like a solid and sometimes it flows like a liquid. Because of this, she explains, sand has been labelled “fragile matter.”
As intellectually stimulating as some of her scientific explanations, it was the eerie, mesmerizing theatricality that kept me engaged: At one point, the two snuggle atop the table, made to look like a bed, with the camera projecting a close-up of their faces, as Chowdhuri as a child speaks with his mother in Bengali, with captions in English projected onto a separate screen. Near the end, he has changed into pajamas and plays in the sandbox, where he makes a grim discovery.
“Rheology” is the second work of theater this week (the other was the quartet of Caryl Churchill plays) in which I more or less felt forced to look for clues tying together elements that don’t immediately suggest a surface compatibility. So, when the physicist tells us rheology “is the science of how matter responds to external stresses” – you might think, oh, the playwright is responding to the external stress of his mother’s mortality. Or, you might pick up on a throwaway line when the physicist starts talking about cremation – “my body will burn and become granular matter” — and start to wonder whether ashes share some of the same properties with sand. Or you might perk up when she observes that “matter comes from the root word ‘mater,’ which means mother.”
I landed on what may be the key to unlocking the connections in “Rheology” – the play – in that phrase fragile matter. “Classically, solids and liquids have distinct rheologies: defined by the presence or absence of a preferred pattern. Fragile matter does not fit within that paradigm because it lives at the margin of being a solid.” This collaboration between mother and son is a deliberate effort to exist outside the normal paradigm of theater.
Rheology
Bushwick Starr through May 10
A co-production with:
HERE Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater Company
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $28-$48 (4 tickets available for $10 for each performance with code ACCESS)
Written and directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury
in collaboration with Bulbul Chakraborty
Set Design: Krit Robinson, Costume Design: Enver Chakartash, Lighting Design: Mextly Couzin and Masha Tsimring, Sound Design: Tei Blow, Video Design: Kameron Neal, Music Director and Cello: George Crotty, Stage Manager: Lisa McGinn, Dramaturg: Sarah Lunnie, Fight Choreographer: David Anzuelo
Cast: Chowdhury and Chakraborty
