Indian American physicist Bulbul Chakraborty has received an Obie Award for her performance in “Rheology,” a critically acclaimed off-Broadway play she collaborated on with her son, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, an award-winning playwright and director.
The Obie Awards honour the “highest caliber of off-Broadway and off-off Broadway theatre to recognize brave work, champion new material, and advance careers in theatre.”
The award for Chakraborty commends her deeply personal turn in “Rheology,” in which she “plunges nakedly, beautifully into her own grief through song, in an expression that is pure divinity,” according to a news release.
Avalanches. Sand. Grain silos. These are just some of the phenomena that Chakraborty, the Enid and Nate Ancell Professor of Physics, has devoted her career to exploring over 36 years as a theoretical physicist at Brandeis, a Waltham, Massachusetts based private research university.
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What makes sand hold its shape — or not? What forces can unjam a jammed grain silo? Chakraborty is interested in “systems far from equilibrium,” a theoretical quest whose main tools are pencil and paper — lots of paper.
Her search is deep and vast: nothing less than the construction of a comprehensive theory that rigorously describes the collective behaviour of granular materials, like sand, which physicists call “fragile matter.”
Chakraborty is a theorist, but her son is an experimentalist in his own field: theatre. An award-winning playwright and director, Chowdhury’s recent play, “Public Obscenities,” was one of three finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.
Mother and son have had a lifelong fascination with each other’s disciplines. Even as a five-year-old, Chowdhury painstakingly copied out the mathematical equations his mother left lying around and asked her many questions about her physics research.
For her part, Chakraborty recognized sparks of creativity in her son and introduced him to literature and music, in particular, the plays, poetry and songs of Bengali writer and composer Rabindranath Tagore.
This mutual fascination grew into a mother-son collaboration starting five years ago, and has culminated in the one-act drama, “Rheology,” which is playing at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn through May 17.
The drama’s title refers to the study of the flow behaviour of certain substances, such as sand. In the play, the granular material acts as the principal metaphor for life and death, love and loss — as it shapeshifts, responds mysteriously to outside forces, and beguiles those who study it, like Chakraborty.
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In the play, the 40-something Chowdhury contemplates the demise of his mother — by staging it. And the 71-year-old Chakraborty, with no previous acting experience, plays opposite him, his real-life mother facing her own mortality on stage.
“We are really discussing my death on stage,” said Chakraborty, who opens the play with a physics lecture on her favourite subject — sand. “It was exposure therapy for Misha, then it started hitting me that it was my mortality.”
“What I hear from the audience is that it has made them think about mortality,” said Chakraborty. “A lot of younger people step out of the play and say, ‘I’m going to call my mom right now.’”
Mother and son offer opposing hypotheses in the play. Chowdhury’s is that he will not survive his mother’s death, while her counter hypothesis is that he will survive.
“Sand is fragile matter; it lives at the margin of being solid, so it has the ability to hold its shape by making small tweaks in the face of shifting external forces,” said Chakraborty. “My son is also fragile, so he will be able to make small changes, and grief will not break him — he will withstand its force.”