Review: Lessons in letting go: In Rheology,' Shayok Misha Chowdhury's secret weapon is his physicist mother
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In “Rheology,” Shayok Misha Chowdhury, an experimental theater artist, and his mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, a theoretical physicist, bridge the language of their different disciplines to explore a subject dear to both of them: loss.Chowdhury, author of the play “Public Obscenities,” a 2024 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the director of the sensational off-Broadway production of Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” is as tenderly devoted to his mother as the young Marcel was to his own in Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” The idea of his mother dying is insupportable to Chowdhury, but given that she’s in her 70s and he’s in his 40s, certain terrifying realities must be faced.“Rheology,” which is receiving its West Coast premiere at REDCAT (in a brief run ending Saturday), is the piece they’ve created to prepare Chowdhury for that fateful day.This strikingly staged Bushwick Starr, HERE Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater Company production is an interdisciplinary experiment that is as playful in its methodology as it is serious in its research aims.Chakraborty, a professor at Brandeis University, starts off with a physics lesson.
Her subject is sand, and she poses a simple question: Is the sand pouring through the hourglass sitting on the counter before her a liquid or a solid?A charismatic teacher, she knows how to Socratically engage a room.Her welcoming manner draws out from the audience the different ways sand behaves both like a solid and like a liquid.
Rheology, or the science of how a substance responds to external stress, is her chief interest.Her research, focused on soft condensed matter, has been seeking a comprehensive theory to explain the curious elasticity of such material.
A photo of a sand dune, in which she’s seated alongside Chowdhury as a toddler, helps illustrate her point that sand can flow like a liquid yet retain its shape li...