The “rheology” begins with a physicist who gives a conference on the sand, with a blackboard full of equations and equipment (hourglass, sandbox, projections) to illustrate his points. It lasts for twenty minutes. It is only when she is choking on the smoke of the dust of one of her demonstrations, and falls dead, that “rheology” becomes a more obvious, although never conventional theater.
“I really felt anxious as soon as you started to cough,” said a man from the public. “I was like: what occurs If someone really calls 911, then an ambulance appears in the middle of this show. “”
Finally, the man presents himself as the playwright and the director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, and presents Bulbul Chakraborty, who is a real physicist and his real mother.
“Rheology”, it turns out that it is a two -character theater work motivated by the anxiety of Chowdhury; More specifically: “I have always had a phobia of my mother’s death … If you were to die, I would die too.”
The play is therefore ostensibly designed in collaboration with its scientific mother to test this hypothesis. The result is an exercise sometimes stretched in physics and family. It takes a while to see a link between the simple scientific facts of Chakraborty on the sand and the evocative staging of Chowdhury on … mortality? His relationship with his mother? His relationship with the theater?
As he demonstrated in “Public obscenities“, His very acclaimed piece which was half in Bengali, Chowdhury, is not afraid to present equipment which is not familiar to most of its audience.
By complete coincidence, on the metro at the Bushwick Starr to see the play, I have read what turned out to be a relevant newspaper article with the title The man sinks on the moving sand and emerges with a girlfriend. The article explains that the long -term friend with whom he was made up of 911 to point out that his “boyfriend” was in the moving sand; It was the first time that she identified it in this way. But it may have made me a little more receptive to the mysteries of the sand that I had not thought much, and it is the work of the life of Chakraborty as a physicist. She goes a lot to ask us to consider: is the sand a liquid or a solid? Sometimes it maintains its shape as a solid and sometimes it flows like a liquid. For this reason, she explains, the sand has been labeled “fragile matter”.
As intellectually stimulating as some of his scientific explanations, it is the strange theatricality that kept me gave me: at one point, the two nestled at the top of the table, formulated to a bed, with the camera projecting a close -up of their faces, because Chowdhuri as a child speaks with her mother in Bengali, with covers in English projected on a separate screen. Towards the end, it turned into pajamas and plays in the sandbox, where it makes a dark discovery.
“Rheology” is the second work of the theater this week (the other was The Caryl Churchill Quartet plays) In which I have more or less forced myself to seek clues binding elements which do not immediately suggest surface compatibility. Thus, when the physicist tells us that rheology “is the science of the way in which matter reacts to external stress” – you might think, oh, the playwright responds to the external stress of his mother’s mortality or, you could resume a disposable line when the physicist will start to speak of cremation – “My body will burn and become the granular matter” – And start wondering if the ashes share some of the same properties with the sand. Or you might go up when she observes that “the material comes from the” mater “root word, which means mother”.
I landed on what could be the key to unlock connections in “rheology” – the piece – in this fragile sentence. “Classically, solids and liquids have distinct rheologies: defined by the presence or absence of a preferred scheme. Fragile matter does not correspond to this paradigm because it lives on the margin of being solid.” This collaboration between mother and son is a deliberate effort to exist outside the normal paradigm of the theater.
Rheology
Bushwick Starr until May 3
A co -production with:
Here Arts Center and Ma-Yi Theater Company
Operating time: 90 minutes without 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, Design costume: Enver chakartash, Design lighting: Mextly Couzin and Masha Tsimring, Sound Design: Tei Blow, Video Design: Kameron Neal, Musical and Vedello Director: George Crotty, stage manager: Lisa McGinn, Dramaturg: Sarah Lunnie, Fight Anzueloo.
Casting: Chowdhury and Chakraborty
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