'Rheology' Off-Broadway review — metatheatre, metaphysics, and memento mori with Mom
Read our review of Rheology off Broadway, written and performed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury alongside his mother, the physicist and professor Bulbul Chakraborty.
Summary
- Rheology sees mother-and-son duo Bulbul Chakraborty (a physicist) and Shayok Misha Chowdhury (the playwright) do a variety of experiments to test their hypotheses about what will happen after Bulbul dies
- The play first appears as a physicist lecture and becomes a comedically melodramatic and gutting show about intergenerational grief and human adaptability
- The show is recommended for parents and children; physics enthusiasts; and people from immigrant backgrounds
When septuagenarian physicist and professor Bulbul Chakraborty sputters into an ominous coughing fit, it disrupts a mundane science demonstration in the play Rheology at Playwrights Horizons. “Is she okay? Help! Help her,” an audience member squeaked audibly. As if on cue, she stops her pretend cough and flashes an impish smile. Then her 41-year-old son, observing from the audience, instructs her to reenact her “death” again. “The intention is for me to really have to sit with the image of your lifeless body,” the playwright, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, says.
Mother and son operate as the ionic bonds within Rheology, a part-lecture, part-memoir experimental play as fluid as sand, literal and metaphorical. Misha (as the script names him) emphasizes that this is not an actress playing his mom: This is his mom in flesh and blood. And he’s not an actor playing the playwright: It’s him. By performing simulations of her death, they can test out their respective hypotheses on whether he can live on without her. His vain, sometimes cartoonish, drive to perfect the theatricality of the experiment point to his mortal anxiety over having no control over her death. But a calm Bulbul insists on her son’s capacity — and the universal human capacity — to adapt after the mourning period, much like rheology itself: the flow and rearrangement of matter.
At my performance, audience laughter rippled out as the pair enacted a deathbed scene out of a soap: a dark and stormy atmosphere (check), a dying mother instructing her son to move on without her (check), and a cello player (George Crotty, planted in the back of the audience) providing weepy strings (check). The tone oscillates between humor and the sobering fear of a loved one’s decline. Who among us hasn’t envisioned death as a melodrama?
Like an outdated tradition of widows burning themselves at their husbands' funeral pyres, Misha resolves to immolate himself with his mother’s body. “You are my only man, Ma, and I will be your widow,” he wails in Bangla as he strikes a match. Luckily, her spirit (Bulbul speaking through a burial shroud) encourages him to keep living and continue her work. As her bereaved son marathons through chalkboard equations, she matter-of-factly describes the molecular disintegration of her body. Think the third act of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, if it decided to go macabre.
Rheology jumps seamlessly between memory-infused surrealism and more straightforward introspection. In one demonstration, Misha reenacts a memory of Bulbul leaving him behind in daycare in striped pajamas. We and his mother observe as this adult man plays in a sandbox. His solemn expression as his sandcastle crumbles conveys a quiet depth of curiosity toward the realities of nature — that matter cannot last forever in its current form. From the sand, he excavates something — one of the show’s theatrical surprises I can’t give away — that could either cement his understanding or provoke more inquiry.
The play functions as emotional, communal immunization against fear of the inevitable, urging us to spark conversations with our living loved ones before they become, in Bulbul’s physicist-speak, “dead matter.” Bulbul’s and Misha’s hypotheses couldn’t be more divergent: He believes he wouldn’t survive her death, while she has faith in his resilience. And yet, in its granular observations, Rheology doesn’t pit their perspectives against each other. It instead unifies them in their research, their variations of grief, and the human will to endure and transform.
Rheology summary
How does matter, like sand, respond to external pressures? That’s what rheology examines. But to define the play Rheology like its namesake concept is reducing it to a grain; it is a mother-son experimental play by playwright/director Shayok Misha Chowdhury and his physicist mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, as they comprehend matter and its movements, the finite nature of mortality, and the intergenerational cycle of losing parents. Their experiment consists of classroom lectures, a melodramatic simulation of her death and aftermath, and Bulbul’s recitation of a Rabindranath Tagore poem once memorized by her late mother.
Rheology transferred to Playwrights Horizons after premiering at the Bushwick Starr.
What to expect at Rheology
When entering Rheology, the audience might feel like college students when they are greeted by Bulbul scrawling equations on a chalkboard pre-show. (Under Mextly Couzin and Masha Tsimring's bright lighting, the critics scrawling in notebooks may as well stand in for students.) She does this below a projected photo of herself and a toddler Misha sitting on a sand dune, an image that will gain sentimental significance like the sediments on her lab table. Aimed at her setup is a video camera that captures live close-ups for the audience.
The initial mundanity of the lecture allows the audience to be caught off guard by theatrical reveals, including a live cello player loitering in the back of the theatre, ready to deliver dramatic music in conjunction with Tei Blow’s lucid sound design.
What audiences are saying about Rheology
The data indicates a positive consensus, with a 100% audience approval score on Show-Score based on three positive reviews. During its previous run at the Bushwick Starr, theatre critics from various outlets similarly praised Rheology.
- “Ihe 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.” - Loren Noveck reviewing for Exeunt
- “As intellectually stimulating as some of her scientific explanations, it was the eerie, mesmerizing theatricality that kept me engaged.” - Jonathan Mandell reviewing for New York Theater
Read more audience reviews of Rheology on Show-Score.
Who should see Rheology
- Fans of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s play Public Obscenities, a Pulitzer Prize finalist that combined reenactments and camera-captured spontaneity, would embrace Rheology as a complement.
- The play can be an unorthodox celebration of parent-child quality time, especially with Mother’s Day falling on May 10 during its run.
- Rheology invites physics whizzes and theatre kids alike to watch a play that bridges the respective professions, finding a kinship in the search for meaning.
- Rheology may speak to macabre-humor fans, such as those who watched the documentary Dick Johnson is Dead, in which a filmmaker, with the help of stuntmen, simulates outrageous “deaths” for her dementia-ridden father.
- Audiences with immigrant backgrounds may resonate with Bulbul’s understated bereavement over separation from her childhood home and family in Kolkata, a reminder that some do not have the privilege to grieve relatives with a goodbye.
Learn more about Rheology off Broadway
Conclusion: Rheology is a remarkable, experimental memento mori play that can’t be categorized or contained within a science flask. Bring tissues.
Photo credit: Rheology off Broadway. (Photos by Maria Baranova)
Originally published on