Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – The experiment’s the thing in Michael Oluokun’s HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT and Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s RHEOLOGY

• By drediman
• May 7, 2026
• No Comments

In a pair of intriguing productions developed by the always adventurous Bushwick Starr, the experiment was the thing — both in terms of form and content. As per usual, read on for my thoughts.

HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT
The Bushwick Starr
Through May 16

Currently at The Bushwick Starr, you’ll find Michael Oluokun’s Have You Ever Thought About (RECOMMENDED), certainly one of the more curious pieces of theater I’ve come across recently. Designed to resemble a sort of immersive variety show with a mad scientist as its host — those colorful Nickelodeon programs from my youth (e.g., You Can’t Do that on Television) nostalgically come to mind — the production implores its audiences to open their minds to the power of free associative thought. Through a series of seemingly random participatory exercises — some involving a chosen audience member, others involving the entire lot — attendees are playfully asked to actively prove Oluokun’s theory. Given such interactive engagements with the audience, there’s little doubt that no two performances are ever alike. Throughout, Oluokun is a comforting presence whose deadpan demeanor seems to both mock and take seriously the evening’s lessons and activities. Thankfully, in their inviting hands, none of the interactive aspects of the production are ever threatening. In a jarring shift, they end the evening all on their own with a stand-up comedy set, stringing together engrossing personal vignettes that have shaped their identity. Also guiding the experience is sidekick Myles Madden, whose occasional pictorial contributions comment on Oluokun’s findings over the course of the evening. Despite being an amusing diversion, Have You Ever Thought About still feels very much like a work in progress (a fact that Oluokun themselves admitted to at the top of the show). Indeed, much of the piece currently feels like spaghetti being thrown on the wall. Although it all doesn’t amount to much — at least currently — the hodgepodge disparity of it all is admittedly part of its charm. If you’re looking for something radically different from your typical theater outing, I’d suggest you check this one out.

RHEOLOGY
The Bushwick Starr / Playwrights Horizons
Closed

Recently shuttered at Playwrights Horizons was the remounting of Rheology (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), a co-production between The Bushwick Starr, HERE, and Ma-Yi Theater Company. Much like Michael Oluokun’s aforementioned Have You Ever Thought About, the piece defies easy categorization and relies on associative thinking to get its point across. 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 experiment in which mother and son bravely shed their inhibitions to permeate each other’s being, starting with each other’s chosen life’s work. 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 the elasticity of 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 boldly 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 yet another example of the kind of thoroughly out-of-the-box experience that distinguishes the art of theater.