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Can Physics Soften a Mother’s Death?
In the play “Rheology,” a son and his mother grapple, in very different ways, with what her eventual death will mean.
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Shayok Misha Chowdhury in his play “Rheology” at Playwrights Horizons.
Credit...
Maria Baranova
By
Tim Teeman
April 25, 2026,
5:02 a.m. ET
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At a recent performance of
“Rheology,”
just after the theoretical physicist Bulbul Chakraborty delivered an illuminating lecture on the nature of matter, she suddenly choked in apparent life-threatening discomfort.
An audience member exclaimed: “Isn’t anyone going to help her?” Their anger soon focused on Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Chakraborty’s son sitting in the audience at Playwrights Horizons, who revealed himself as the director of the shocking tableau. Later, Chakraborty enacted her own death, lying inert under a sheet.
The dynamic between Chakraborty, 72, and Chowdhury, 41, seems loving, intense, witty and respectful. The play — written by Chowdhury (a theater maker known for “Public Obscenities” and “Prince Faggot”) with his mother, a professor at Brandeis University — is a very personal investigation into her dying, which he is terrified of.
Chakraborty, in response to her son’s distressingly acute alarm, delivers calm, science-based explanations of mortality, using rheology — the science of how matter responds to external stresses — as a narrative frame to allay his fears, examine her own feelings about mortality and consider their intense relationship.
“Love and death are inextricably linked in Bengali literature and music,” Chowdhury said. “My mother’s father passed before I was born, and her grief at his loss was a constitutive element of her identity.”
Chakraborty grew up in India, singing “Rabindrasangeet,”
a repertoire of songs
about the natural world by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet and dramatist. Chowdhury’s father, Partha, 71, is also a physics professor.
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