This piece is part of the Mehfil folio, which features original art by Jasjyot Singh Hans. The folio also includes an excerpt of Shayok Misha Chowdhury‘s play, Public Obscenities.

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During my conversation last year with Shayok Misha Chowdhury, the writer and director evinced the idea, attributed to one of his mentors, that “we go to the theater to see people see.” Threaded through Chowdhury’s playwriting debut, Public Obscenities, which explores with brilliance and sensitivity our doomed attempts to claim or be claimed by a place, is the process of unlearning that is inextricable from seeing, or seeing anew. This sense of unveiling is on full display in the bilingual play’s protagonist Choton, a queer doctoral student, who travels from America with his boyfriend Raheem to his deceased grandfather’s crumbling home in Kolkata. A seeker at his core, Choton desperately wants to say he knows something about his ancestral home. But the truths he discovers there ask him to reconceive how he once made sense of this place, his place in this world, and the self he will be asked to carry with him when he leaves.

This interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, accompanies an excerpt of Public Obscenities. In the scene, Choton and his boyfriend, together with Choton’s paternal aunt and her husband, apprehend the apparition of Dadu, Choton’s grandfather, in a decades-old and only recently developed photograph. Although the audience never sees the picture, we see how each of Dadu’s family members sees him, and we stretch our imagination to envision the dead. The scene continues with Choton’s uncle recounting to Raheem from memory a dream of a film. It’s a strange gift for Raheem, who is a director of photography, to receive and behold, and the audience is left to wonder how he’ll take up the responsibility of reconceiving the dream on screen. 

I saw Public Obscenities in 2023, when it premiered in New York City at Soho Rep, a co-production with NAATCO, and again in 2024, at Theatre for a New Audience. Chowdhury went on to win an Obie Award in directing for the world premiere of the play, which was also named a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in drama. I’m grateful to have been invited into the making of such a finely drawn world, and to have been given the chance to be welcomed into the mehfil that is Chowdhury’s own mind.

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Rajat Singh (RS) 

What was the process of writing and revising Public Obscenities?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury (SMC) 

I first started writing the play at the beginning of 2021. I was in this amazing gift of a residency that came my way at the most inauspicious time for theater. During the 2020–2021 season, Soho Rep brought eight artists on salary for a year. And I was lucky enough to be one of the artists. My training is as a director, and that’s how I’ve operated in the theater world for many years. And so, I thought I always worked best and liked to work in collaboration. The rehearsal room is my happy place—or was my happy place. I thought that I wouldn’t hate the solitary act of sitting and writing a play by myself, but I’d never sat down and written a solo-authored, good old-fashioned play this way. And so, these two things converged: the pandemic and this amazing gift of time and money that Soho Rep gave me at that moment when all of theater was shut down. So, I just knew that I had to take advantage of that rare opportunity. I was like, If I don’t write a play this year, then I’m never going to write a play. 

I think Public Obscenities is a thing that I learned how to write while writing it. And I have been wanting to write something like this for a very long time. My family’s home back in Kolkata is my forever source material. And the first thing I wanted to work with was this voice memo that I had of a conversation that I’d had with my uncle, my mama, back in Kolkata, in which my uncle shared this dream with me, which shows up verbatim in the play. That’s the only truly autobiographical nugget. That was where I began. 

What I first started writing was almost like a short story. It was like a direct address from Choton to the audience to describe the universe of this home and Kolkata. Ultimately, all of that scaffolding wanted to go away. And I had no idea what the play was going to be about. I just knew that I wanted to draw from what I was hearing when I remembered the trips my partner and I took back to Kolkata. It was the experience that so many other writers that I admire talk about, but I’ve never had it myself: conjuring these characters and following them as if they were real, true, alive people that had things happen to them. And it became my job to figure out what they were doing and what they said next and what happened to them. It was a process of following the impulses of these characters. 

The process of revising was continuing to figure out the true story: Is that what happens there? Is that what Raheem says there? When does it feel like I’m forcing something as a writer that isn’t true? How do I craft a journey for these characters that feels like what actually happened to them, which is a weird way to think, especially since the characters are close to my and my partner’s skin. But at some point, they became people that were not us. Only then could I really listen to them and follow them. 

RS

Does Public Obscenities reach back in time toward a particular artistic tradition? Is the play in conversation with other works of art, or with any ancestors, queer or otherwise? Who besides the characters was in the room when you were writing?

SMC

Who I was reading and who was helping me write the play are very different from the people that were in the room. 

Cherríe Moraga is always with me when I write because she is the one through whom I became a writer. She was always encouraging me to write in my mother tongue and to go home. And that felt like a call that I answered in different ways when I was younger. In some ways, the play is inspired by my forever attempt to respond to that mandate that I inherited from Cherríe. 

But I never really understood how I could truly write in the linguistic universes that were true to me because I always felt I was this rare person in my Bengali universe who had retained fluency in their mother tongue. I was like, How can I write a play that nobody’s going to understand? If I were to write to my life from my life, the play would be 50 percent in Bengali. There are going to be whole scenes that are fully in Bengali. And so, I think it took me growing up and theater growing up. 

My partner was in the room with me, literally. So much of the piece is inspired not only by our trips back to Kolkata, but also by his work as a video designer, which helped me imagine the possibility of doing a show in two languages in the theater, which was not a thing I thought possible twenty years ago. 

So certainly, Cherríe and all of the people I met through Cherríe—Sharon Bridgforth, Joy Harjo—who showed me that it was possible to write in the vernacular and lean into the music of one’s vernacular. 

When I was writing the play, I was mostly reading and rereading all of Amy Herzog’s plays and all of Richard Nelson’s plays. I’m so attracted to that granular, naturalistic writing. I was learning how to trust myself to do that while I was writing the play. Those plays were helpful models. 

And perhaps it goes without saying that the entire lineage of Bengali theater and cinema is in the DNA of the play and is even alluded to and paid homage to in the play. I grew up watching all of the Bangla and neorealist cinema that’s evoked in the play—Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak—and I think that I was always more attracted to realism than the soapy melodrama that showed up on Bengali stages here in the diaspora and even back in Kolkata. In those films, I saw what it looked like to tell our stories in a meticulous, specific, human way. I wanted to do that in the theater.

RS

With respect to other genres, what was it like to incorporate photography and cinema into Public Obscenities? Why was it important for you to fold these forms into the play? How do you see the play holding them all?

SMC

I don’t know that I entered into it thinking about it as such. That’s the gift of theater and playwriting—everything emerges out of the characters. It is true to our lives that I am a words person, and my partner is an images person—or perhaps that we help each other think in those different modes. The tension and complementary relationship between those two fluencies in Choton and Raheem was one of the first things that was true about the play. I knew that the play was going to be about the thorniness of collaboration inside a relationship, as well as the gift of collaboration between two people who speak different creative languages.

Because my training is as a director, much of what excites me about working in the theater is getting to paint in three dimensions and work with designers to bring the visual architecture of a piece to life. I guess the play just became more and more about photography and film and cinema. 

And I think it emerges from the original source material, which is a dream about a movie that my uncle was seeing. And so, that thing that wasn’t even from me—he gave me this gift, this shot-for-shot description of a movie that he’d seen in his dream forty years ago, in 1985. The fact that he could, through language, communicate to me this moving image that he’d seen in his subconscious while sleeping forty years ago, and that I could picture it—I don’t remember what of it is my language and what was his now—but when the character Pishi describes the dream, he says he picturized the thing. 

My mentor in grad school, Anne Bogart, always used to say, “We go to the theater to see people see.” One of my favorite scenes, whenever I would watch the play, is watching Pishi describe this dream to Raheem, and seeing him see that dream, see that film. It always was a kind of magic to see him see the thing again every night so that we could see it. I think the whole play is us seeing people see other things without seeing them ourselves. We’re getting a refracted image. The play became about the images that we construct, and how they are inevitably images we construct of people that we love, and how they’re fatally flawed. I wanted to lean into that in the audience’s experience of the play, such that the audience was also having to project their own imaginations of what these pictures of Dadu were.

RS

How do you envision the roles of director and audience?

SMC

We have no idea what we’ve made until it meets an audience and we learn from the audience. Theater is this process whereby we bring this untested thing to audiences and remake the thing in real time, in response to the feedback of audiences—and each audience is different. But also, the play does a thing in relationship with the audience. You begin to know and shape how the play will move dynamically. The audience is another character.

My role as director is basically to be the audience proxy. I have to pay attention to what the play is doing in me—whether I am holding my breath, or whether I’m tensing my muscles, or whether I’m cringing in a good way or a bad way, or whether I’m leaning forward in my seat, or whether I don’t buy it. Ultimately, the hope is that the audience loses themselves. By the time Public Obscenities was up and running, even I, who knew the play so intimately, could watch it and not be watching myself watch it, which meant that I was just in what was unfolding in front of me. 

RS

The script itself lays out the architecture of the play, with form given in the text to overlapping speech, to people talking over one another, and to interruptions. Everyone is talking over one another. And the experience of watching that on stage felt very powerful to me. 

SMC

The rhythm and the music of how we talk to one another in real life is the material that I can’t help but work from. I can try and figure out what wants to happen in a scene. But then everything ends up being about the rhythm of dialogue. That’s the place from which story emerges. Events emerge out of what the music of the dialogue calls for. Like, this is the moment in which somebody else enters. And then the music of the dialogue asks for this other voice to enter the score. And then I’m like, Who is that? Okay, now I have to make up a person. 

I didn’t know the grandmother necessarily was going to be in the play. But then she called from the other room, because they needed a voice from over there to come in. There could have been twelve people in Public Obscenities. There could have been a dog in Public Obscenities. The house could expand or contract to meet what the musical score of the piece asked for. The music has its own agenda that will assert itself eventually. 

RS

Did you go into writing the play with an idea of what “home” meant or looked like, and how has the process of creation changed that original notion of home?

SMC

There’s so many ways that I can respond to that. I’ve been preparing my whole life to write about my home in Kolkata. It was a revelation that I could write that home as richly and deeply as I did, because I am only one member of that home. It wasn’t that I just wrote me and the home through me or Choton or somebody like me. It was also a revelation that this was the universe that I knew most intimately—its floor plan, its architecture. But there is a confidence that emerged in me once I discovered that I had all those characters’ voices available to me. I didn’t know that was going to be the case. 

For me, the play is about how the work that Choton puts into trying to prove his nativeness in a place, how the work that he puts into trying to prove that this is home, is always destined to fail. It’s looking back at a former self—I am now in a place where that doesn’t feel fraught anymore. “We can conjure this world on a stage in New York.” Cherríe would always say this to me. I understood in theory that I, as a diasporic, queer Bengali, have access to some different way of conjuring my home in Kolkata here, but I didn’t know what that would look like or mean. And it feels like I have it with me here. The world feels smaller somehow. Doing the play made me realize that I have that house with me. It feels like the play did some magic work—like, perhaps those worlds are not as far apart, like I don’t have to bemoan their distance quite as much.

RS

I’m in awe of this attempt to articulate—or re-present—some image that you carry around and that Choton is carrying, and then learning to sit with that gap, because we’re watching something else emerge that isn’t really what was in your head. I recognized differences in myself on the two nights that I attended the play. It made me think you were creating something anew each night. I find that bewildering, the ability to live in that gap and still continue to create. 

To conclude, what kinds of creative questions have guided you in the past and have they changed as you’ve moved through your career? Lastly, what does creative fulfillment look like for you?

SMC 

Oh, I love that. I think writing this play has completely reoriented what creative fulfillment looks like to me and the kinds of creative questions that I’m asking myself. And it feels like I’ve found how I truly like to work. I was fumbling in that direction for decades. Public Obscenities freed me up to listen to what guided my work. 

I used to enter into projects from a place of: what is the question here? And that has yielded really important fruit for me. My partner and I did a piece called MukhAgni at the Public Theater, right before the pandemic in 2020. That was a performance memoir in which we were asking: what do we want to happen to our bodies after we die? 

Public Obscenities feels like a very different way into creativity. I don’t know that it was driven by a personal question. Of course, many questions and discoveries and answers emerged out of working on Public Obscenities. Certainly, I never want to go into making a piece with an argument or a thesis—before, I thought I wanted to go in with a question. Now I feel like every piece that I’m working on after Public Obscenities is me coming into an awareness of the fact that I have these worlds that are available to me, and I’m interested in writing the music of that particular world, and that world will teach me something. People will come into being. People will walk through the door. It’s more a feeling of knowing as little as possible, knowing less. 

I used to think that the feeling of fulfillment was about something having worked on me. Like, Oh, I’ve written this piece in order to grapple with this question or learn X thing myself. Now it feels more like I want to craft the truest, most musical version of this world. It feels religious, like it’s for the gods, it’s for the characters. And then, of course, something’s going to happen to me, but the characters are also constantly asking themselves so many different questions. Allowing their concerns and questions to be paramount has been really exciting and freeing. It feels like, Oh, I get to do this now. And it’s less about me, even though so much of what I write is so autobiographical. It doesn’t feel like it’s about me and my questions anymore—even though of course it is.

Read an excerpt of Public Obscenities here.