Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Coping through art and science: Patrick Bringley’s ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD and Shayok Misha Chowdhury‘s RHEOLOGY

• By drediman
• April 22, 2025
• No Comments

This past weekend, I encountered a pair of theatrical works featuring their respective creators coping with life with the aid of, respectively, art and science (via theater, of course). As per usual, read on below for my thoughts on these deeply personal new plays.

RHEOLOGY
The Bushwick Starr
Through May 3

First up over at The Bushwick Starr is Rheology (RECOMMENDED), a co-production with HERE and Ma-Yi Theater Company that’s one of the more curious pieces of theater I’ve come across recently. A collaboration between theater-maker Shayok Misha Chowdhury (a deserved Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his terrific cross-cultural play Public Obscenities) and his physicist mother Bulbul Chakraborty — both of whom also appear in the piece — the unlikely work springs from Misha’s intense fear of eventually losing his mother, as well as Bulbul’s own fascination with the physical properties of sand. The result is a startlingly personal, category-defying experiment in which mother and son bravely shed their inhibitions in order to permeate each other’s being, starting with each other’s chosen life’s work. As such, the production begins essentially as a physics lecture in which Bulbul expounds on the baffling characteristics of sand, namely the way it takes on the qualities of both solids and liquids. Such confounding observations can be taken as a metaphor for the larger mysteries of life, namely our relationship with aging and mortality. Indeed, in a series of increasingly intimate and avant-garde “scenes” (no spoilers here!), audience members become firsthand witnesses — sometime awkwardly so — to the mother-and-son duo’s obsessive meta-theatrical experimentation. Suffice to say, both Misha and Bulbul, each brilliant minds in their own respect, give disarmingly candid performances that have lingered in my mind. As an active act of mutual reckoning, I found the work to be tremendously moving, if at times impenetrable. In summary, Rheology is the kind of thoroughly out-of-the-box theater-making that feels right at home at The Bushwick Starr.

ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD
DR2 Theatre
Through May 25

Far more straightforward is the stage adaptation of Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World (RECOMMENDED) at the DR2 Theatre. Based on the well-received 2023 memoir of the same name, Bringley’s autobiographical solo show similarly chronicles the unexpected death of his brother and — in order to deal with the loss — his subsequent decision to leave his posh journalism job in favor of becoming a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through daily exposure to and contemplation of the museum’s enormous collection of art, his interactions with visitors, and his comradeship with fellow guards, he’s able to process his grief, eventually emerging from his funk a different man — more grounded and appreciative of the wonders of world, large and small. Even if the lessons presented are nothing we haven’t heard before, the play is nonetheless a gentle and affecting reminder to pause and take a look around you to cherish life. Bringley’s likable yet unassuming stage presence is a calming balm, and his “everyman” performance is confidently delivered in spite of his decidedly reserved demeanor. He’s also a compellingly lucid storyteller, effortlessly casting a spell over the audience with his illuminating tales and thoughts over the course of the show’s ninety minutes. All the Beauty in the World has been patiently staged by British director Dominic Dromgoole (the former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe), whose clear-eyed production — which beautifully augments Bringley’s performance with some expert, subtle projections (kudos to projection designer by Austin Switser) — elegantly translates the piece from page to stage.