Shayok Misha Chowdhury in Rheology. Photo: Maria Baranova

Fittingly for a piece that takes as one of its subjects the contested borderland between states of matter, Rheology itself straddles and navigates any number of boundaries: public lecture and private ritual; English and Bangla; solids and liquids; science and poetry; quiet grief and histrionic melodrama–and ultimately, and most substantively, life and death. There are big ideas in Rheology—a substantial portion of it would stand on its own as a captivating physics lecture about the structural properties of fragile solids (sand being the example primarily used here), plus, of course, you will learn what “rheology” means (the science of how matter responds to external stresses, used here as both science and metaphor). Bulbul Chakraborty, mother of playwright and director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is a theoretical physicist, a professor at Brandeis University, and by all evidence here, a wonderful teacher. [Note that for the purposes of this review, I’m using “Chowdhury” to refer to the writer/director and “Misha” to the “character” as he appears in the play.]

But one does not go to the Bushwick Starr to see the work of one of last year’s nominees for a Pulitzer Prize for drama purely to see him direct his mother’s physics lecture, and the beating heart of Rheology is less its intellectual rigor than its tenderness—a tender love between mother and son; a tender pride and respect in each for the other’s passionate work; a tender joy in getting to work together–and the way it uses the language of both theater and science to express this love. In the play’s sharpest moments, the theater and the science–the art of both Misha and Bulbul–ultimately braid together, through their love, to grapple with the grotesqueness of grief. 

Chowdhury has just turned forty; his mother is seventy-one. As Misha describes, they’re very close, they speak every day–and the thought of losing her to death is utterly unbearable to him. So, much in the way that an old-school vaccine uses deactivated particles of a disease to inoculate you, brushing you with its denatured version to protect you against its more dangerous forms, Rheology is conceived almost as a vaccine for Misha against the torrential grief of his mother’s inevitable death. So much does he fear it that he imagines dying with her, like the widows of old, burned on the same pyre. So much does he fear it that he rehearses it here, using the audience as almost a one-way mirror through which he can see our response to not only Bulbul’s death but his reaction to it.

Krit Robinson’s set seems for the first part of the piece to be simply a small lecture hall, with a full-width chalkboard, a lab table, a media cart bearing a large monitor, a projection screen pulled down over part of the chalkboard. The audience is seated in semicircular risers that feel like classroom seating. Bulbul, alone onstage, draws equations, performs a small experiment, shows slides, demonstrates her theories in the sandbox at center. As she teaches us about the peculiar properties of sand, she engages with the audience, soliciting our contributions to the question of whether sand is a solid or a liquid; as we learn, it behaves in some particulars like both. Misha watches from the audience. 

But then, something goes wrong–something that the audience at first can’t quite confidently assign to a category (see the metaphor, again): is it planned or accidental; part of the demonstration or an actually scary disruption of it? And here, Misha reveals himself as the director, pausing and repeating the moment until its possible darker meaning leaches away through exposure therapy. And from here, we start slipping into the more explicitly theatrical, as Misha takes over the stage, rehearsing and re-presenting the possibility of his mother’s death while “literally, contractually” obligating her to remain alive five nights a week on this stage with him.

Misha spirals through his imaginations of his mother’s death in different manifestations, all the ways in which he will disintegrate without her: a melodrama where, against the backdrop of a raging storm, he pursues her research in a manic bilingual dialogue with her corpse; a return to childhood where, clad in primary-colored pajamas (costumes are by Enver Chakartash), he unearths relics in the sandbox. And meanwhile, Bulbul proceeds down her scientific path: describing, precisely and unsentimentally, the biology of bodily decay; pressing on her son’s hypotheses to push him toward the realization that the very things that make him fragile also make him resilient. That he will–he must–survive his mother’s decline and death, just as Bulbul survived her own mother’s decline and death. 

The show’s sparing and precise use of theater technology/magic at the outset gives Chowdhury the director plenty of room for beautiful surprise when it turns elsewhere. For much of it, Mextly Couzin and Masha Tsimring’s lighting mostly duplicates house lights; the room is just a room. But when the play slips out of lecture and into a heightened reality that draws on melodrama, body horror, even A Beautiful Mind, the chalkboard comes to life with bright fluorescence (projections by Kameron Neal); the lights grow saturated and shadowy; a stormy soundscape (by Tei Blow) and a live cellist (George Crotty, who’s been in the audience all along) kick in–and Chowdhury modulates seamlessly across Chowdhury the director giving notes, to Chowdhury the playwright describing his process, to Misha the character in his own family saga, to Misha the child, playing with a child’s inquisitive seriousness. 

Oddly, I find myself reminded of another show I recently reviewed, I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan, a show whose existence depends on both the imagined and the factual presence of one very particular actor for both its theatrical realization and the power of its meaning. Somehow, that feels akin to this show’s roots in the realities of Chowdhury and Chakraborty’s lives and relationship; Rheology would not exist without that relationship and yet it transmutes those truths into something intensely theatrical. Stylistically, thematically, tonally, the shows are very different, but both partake similarly of the intense evanescence of theater: shows that could only happen with a very precise configuration of artists, time, and place; shows that remind us of the ineffable human bedrock on which we build our art. Shows that remind us of what a precious, fragile solid theater itself is.