The Brooklyn Rail

In a rare theatrical alignment, two queer playwrights, both of South Asian origin, concurrently performed autobiographical works that are centered on their own mothers.

In Amm(i)gone (a PlayCo, Woolly Mammoth Theatre, The Flea, and Kelly Strayhorn Theater co-production running at The Flea in Tribeca through April 14, and on a national tour starting in May), Adil Mansoor recounts his offstage collaboration with his mom while working on a translation of Sophocles’s Antigone.

In Rheology (running through May 3, 2025 at the Bushwick Starr), Shayok Misha Chowdhury collaborates with and performs alongside his scientist mother, Bulbul Chakraborty, in a challenging experiment that explores their respective professions.

Mansoor, primarily a theater director and educator, and Chowdhury, also an Obie-winning director and the author of Public Obscenities, have never had the opportunity to meet and discuss each others’ work prior to this conversation with the Brooklyn Rail. The conversation below, which was conducted via Zoom, has been edited for length and clarity.

Gerard Raymond (Rail): Let’s start with an intro about yourselves and your current work.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: I’m Bengali. I was born in India and moved to the States when I was very young and grew up in New England and Massachusetts. The material of my life very much has to do with a strange codependence and closeness that I have with my family. The expectation of a fraught experience, being a queer kid in the South Asian context is, weirdly, not my story. My parents were the first people I came out to and there was never a rub there.

I’ve been working on Rheology with my mom for almost five years now. She’s a physicist who works on granular materials—the physics of materials like sand: how they flow like a liquid and hold their shape like a solid. We started the project by simply asking ourselves what it would be like for the two of us to collaborate. My mom is also a singer, and I grew up singing Rabindra Sangeet [songs written and composed by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore] with her. I would approach physics as a foreign language that she spoke, in the same way that I learned singing from her. This piece is about my obsession with my mom; she’s obsessed with the physics of sand. The experiment is about putting my forty-year-old self and my mom’s seventy-one-year-old self on stage together.

Adil Mansoor: The resonances are really lovely, and the ways in which we talk about these things diverge, which is also just as exciting to hear. I was born in Karachi, Pakistan and moved to the suburbs of Chicago when I was three months old; I’m very much a Midwestern kid. I was raised in a Muslim household. My mom has delved into her piety more and more as she’s gotten older. She’s a total rockstar and I adore her. Our relationship got complicated in my twenties and thirties. We found it hard to talk about a lot of things together. And at the same time, I find a lot of joy being in a room with her.

I read Antigone for the first time in 2018. Antigone making the decision to bury her brother knowing it will get her killed—I saw her as this radical feminist badass, and also someone who was prioritizing the afterlife over being alive. In that I saw versions of my mom, who was a social worker when I was a kid and who is a hijabi [observes the Muslim religious practice of wearing a headscarf]. She discovered my queerness on Google and she prays for me every night to return to Allah, to return to Islam. Sometimes that makes me feel like I’ve died, and other times it’s like really understanding how much energy she’s spending taking care of me in the way she knows how.

So, out of desperation and, I think, optimism and eagerness, I asked my mom to collaborate—to be a dramaturge, a co-conspirator. We started translating Antigone into Urdu and Arabic together. The deal was, I get to work on a play with my mom, and she gets to teach me about the Qur’an in Urdu and Arabic. And, you all know this, when you are talking about a play, you’re talking about your lives. But it’s filtered through this two thousand-year-old tragedy. In a certain way I felt like I was coming out as a theater-maker to her. It was like: “Oh, this is what I’m like when I’m in a classroom or a rehearsal room,” and she’s seeing how I think about a play. And then I got to see my mom dig into the play in such magnificent ways. It’s illuminating and so beautiful the way she talks about the characters. I’m really grateful to have a mum who is so curious and open to dig into questions with me. Not everyone gets that.

Rail: Being curious about your moms is a common thread in both your plays. Misha, you’ve said that you want to understand your mum’s language as a physicist and, Adil, it sounds like you want to understand your mom’s spirituality. Tell us some more about what you learned from these two remarkable women who have influenced your work.

Chowdhury: It’s just wild that these two things are happening back-to-back. I love that you use the word curiosity because I think love expressed through a kind of mutual curiosity is so much the material of the thing that I’m trying to make. And it sounds like that is sort of percolating inside of your relationship with your mom as well, Adil.

I loved what you were saying, Adil, about coming out to your mom as a theatermaker. Much of what my mom and I are doing together in this piece is getting to meet each other’s professional selves, which is a thing that my mom never got to do with her mom. Just to become her colleague for a brief moment in time—it’s a thing that partners, loved ones, rarely get to do with each other.

Mansoor: Yes, I have a lot of curiosity about my mom’s Urdu and Arabic; she’s literally an Arabic scholar. And yet the thing that has been the most surprising in my experience with this work is the fact that I have now rigorously studied my mom’s literal voice for five years, listening to dozens of hours of her audio over and over. There’s a musicality to her voice that’s pretty astronomical. I think she sounds like she’s singing all the time now. The way she says “ok” lives inside of my skin. “Ok” means everything—it can mean “get the fuck out of here,” or “I love you so much.” You’ll hear it in the first phone call in the play, where she says “ok” five times and they mean completely different things. I thought, this is so funny, and my boyfriend’s like, “You know you do the same thing!”

Chowdhury: Yeah, it’s about what we don’t know about the people who we know most intimately in our lives. Adil, I think the obvious difference between these two projects is that my mom is on stage. Your mom is on stage in a different way, so I’m wondering about your mom’s relationship to the actual thing that you’ve made. Has she seen it, or iterations of it?

Mansoor: The most basic answer is no. My mom has not seen the show and I don’t know if she will. Amm(i)gone is literally about how impossible it is to talk about these things, and we have to turn to Sophocles to somehow voice the un-voiceable. The work is really sitting in the quiet and the silence of those things and attempting to find forward possibility in that. Coming out can look all kinds of ways. And then it’s not about coming out per se. It’s a fine balance. There’s an invitation that’s open—“hey, I’m continuing to do the thing and know that you can ask me any questions”—and then talking about the dal on the table. You know, moving quickly forward. And then there’s also funny logistics—she signed a media release form! Misha, I’m curious about when mom and son show up in the rehearsal room, who’s taking care of whom? How are you navigating that?

Chowdhury: It’s requiring me to approach my mother in ways that are challenging for me. To truly approach somebody as a colleague, I have to be okay with making them do things they don’t want to do and with the frustrations and negative feelings that arise. For the most part, because my mom and I spend so much time together, that is not a particularly fraught process, but the hard thing is, do I trust that she’s taking care of herself? There is a frankness and a thorniness when my mother and I work together that cuts through the politesse of American theater. I’m surrounded by amazing collaborators on the production, and I was watching them not know what to do because it looks like we are fighting or something. But to us we aren’t. They think she’s mad at me, but we interrupt each other and don’t let each other finish sentences all the time.

Mansoor: Listening to you, Misha, I was reminded: my collaborators on this project, also, are my chosen family. I have actually kept the family I have come from separate from the family I have chosen. One of the most magical parts of this project has been, all of a sudden, all these people are together—people who have now studied my mom’s voice,who have gone through all my boyfriend’s photos to figure out which is the right one for the production. All these things are coming together and that’s part of what’s making me feel whole.

Chowdhury: My parents are sort of woven into almost every aspect of my life; there are no secrets between us. So it’s weird; at this juncture in our lives there is a question—are you a physicist or a mom first? Your students and your colleagues know you as this whole other powerhouse that I can’t really know. I’m watching my mom navigate not being the queen of her own turf at this juncture in her career and her life.

Rail: What has doing these two plays meant for each of you?

Mansoor: The play allows for my partner and my mom to be imagined together, which isn’t a gift I’ve gotten in my real life. It gives me the opportunity to believe that it is yet to come. Me and my mom, my siblings and my partner, right now, are in a much more grounded, caring and loving place than we were in 2018. I’m not trying to pretend that the play is why, but I’m grateful that those journeys have aligned. I’m so thankful for my given and chosen families, and it is wild to get to share that with people.

Chowdhury: That’s beautiful. I think so much of Rheology is about recognizing that my time with my mom is finite. I’m literally trying to invent time. I’m using theater—holding onto my mom and forcing her to spend time with me the way that a kid would by making their mom play with them. She is literally contractually obligated to be doing the show with me every night. My partner was reminding me the other day of what you put so beautifully out there, which is that it is such a rare thing to have a parent who wants to play with you in this way and is willing and game and cares enough about me to do this weird thing.