Shayok Misha Chowdhury

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the bona fide theatrical hits of 2023 was a play titled “Public Obscenities” by director-turned-playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury. It opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan in January of 2023 to the kind of glowing reviews and audience responses a playwright can only dream of. The same production was remounted that fall at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington D.C., and as of this writing, it is currently running at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. 

A New York Times Critic’s Pick from its first outing, the play continues to draw raves in its latest iteration. Helen Shaw of The New Yorker calls it a triumph. A few days after this interview, Misha won an Obie for his direction of the play, this after the play’s cast received a 2023 Drama Desk Award for best ensemble. 

What makes the success of “Public Obscenities” so remarkable is that that there’s nothing about the play that screams “Guaranteed Surefire Hit!” For one thing, with its relatively large cast of seven and with its multimedia elements, it’s not cheap to produce. Then also it is bilingual, partly in English, partly in the playwright’s native Bangla. Granted, Bangla is the sixth most spoken native language in the world (thank you, Wikipedia), but it is not a language familiar to most Americans. Plus, though sections of the play in which Bangla is spoken are supertitled, there are other scenes without any translations at all. 

Also, the play is very queer. It follows an Indian-American PhD candidate as he returns with his Black American boyfriend to a family home in Kolkata, India. There he plans to interview sexual minorities for his dissertation. The play is therefore very frank about sexuality and features two non-gender-conforming characters.

And it’s three hours long.

But despite these details — or maybe exactly because of them — the play is an unqualified hit.

Here Misha details how he hewed to his vision for the play no matter its evolving demands and hints at a road map for struggling theaters and the artists who wish to create work for their stages.

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• How did you develop your play, especially given that most of your cast ended up not being New York-based?
• How did you navigate that thing of, “OK, this has to be produced, I want to make it producible, and at the same time I want to be true to what it’s turning out to be”? How did you negotiate those conflicting demands?
• How did you massage the play so that an audience would feel unsettled when needed and comfortable when needed?
• What advice would you have for playwrights who want to write a bilingual or trilingual play but are feeling nervous about it?
• Is the queerness in the play received differently by Indian or Bangladeshi audience members versus non-Bangladeshi?
• So much has been written about the crisis that American theater is facing … what’s your prognosis for your own prospects within it? What do you think theaters around the country need to get paying audiences to return?
• You’ve also been a teacher, teaching nascent artists. How would you prepare a student to be a theater artist in America today?

Pier Carlo Talenti: How did you develop your play, especially given that most of your cast ended up not being New York-based?

Misha Chowdhury: I started writing the piece under the auspices of this residency that Soho Rep had invented in the thick of the pandemic called Project Number One. They were paying me and seven other artists to be on salary for a full year just to work on a project of our choosing and be in thought partnership with the organization. 

Pier Carlo: Wow, hold on, that’s incredible.

Misha: Yeah.

Pier Carlo: Wait, I want to dig down into this.

Misha: Please.

Pier Carlo: So how were you approached? Do you think you would have been able to create this play without this residency?

Misha: No, no, absolutely not. The circumstances of that residency were what allowed me to even imagine sitting and writing a play. I’m a director by training. I wouldn’t even have thought to sit and write this play if somebody hadn’t said, “You have a whole year to sit and write a play, and we’re going to pay you a salary and benefits to do it,” which was nutso. The way in which they completely altered the way I thought of myself as an artist just by valuing me and my time, that’s what gave me the ambition and confidence and gift of time to even think of writing a play.

Pier Carlo: Did you have to pitch something to them, or did they just say, “Here we go, we’re going to support you”?

Misha: No, no, no. It was just Sarah and Meropi and Cynthia. I’d been in relationship with the theater, and they picked eight artists. The eight artists that they picked weren’t traditionally generative artists. It wasn’t like, “Oh, here we are, picking eight artists to commission works that we’re going to see at our theater.” There were two actors, two designers, two directors, two playwrights.

It was just an open invitation to come into this relationship with the theater and be on staff for a year and be in thought partnership with them and work on a thing. There wasn’t even any expectation that the thing that we were working on be any kind of theatrical product in the traditional sense. I think I’m the only one who wrote a good old-fashioned play because I was like, “When else am I going to have this opportunity to get paid to write a good old-fashioned play?”

The entire genesis of the play is completely tethered to that residency and that relationship. I wrote the first couple of pages and sent those pages to the directors at Soho Rep, and I was using them as accountability buddies while I was writing. Very early on, they decided to make a commitment to commission and produce the play just from seeing a few pages of it, which meant that I had a sense of security or a home for the play from the very beginning.

Pier Carlo: Right, because that’s very rare. Most playwrights who get commissioned, so to speak, rarely have that promise.

Misha: Exactly, yeah.

Pier Carlo: So what did that mean to you, to know that there was going to be a production coming down the pipe?

Misha: It gave me a kind of freedom to experiment and write precisely what I was going to write. It wasn’t as though I had to write a play that felt like was possible to be produced at Soho Rep. In fact, what I ended up writing, it felt like a kind of impossibility in terms of its scale and scope, and in terms of its cast.

Pier Carlo: Having only read it and not had the pleasure of seeing it, it still feels kind of impossible to me.

Misha: Oh, a hundred percent.

Pier Carlo: You say that this was your first “traditional” play, but in so many ways, as you know, it is far from traditional.

Misha: Sure, yeah.

Pier Carlo: How did you navigate that thing of, “OK, this has to be produced, I want to make it producible, and at the same time I want to be true to what it’s turning out to be”? How did you negotiate those conflicting demands? 

Misha: I do think that I was freed from that consideration of whether or not it would be producible, or at least I was operating, perhaps foolishly, from that place while I was writing the play because I had that sense of security around the way in which Soho Rep was supporting it. 

Pier Carlo: So you knew it was going to be largely bilingual from the start?

Misha: Yes. I wrote the first scene of the play first, and it felt to me as though I would only allow it to be produced if it could ... . There was no way I was going to make the play happen without being super rigorous about the language and casting concerns that make the play possible. I had a lot of doubt throughout that there was any way that we were going to be able to make this happen. I was pretty certain that we would have to bring actors in from India and sponsor visas. I was just sort of like, “If you’re going to produce this play, you have to commit to the authenticity of the language considerations that are so embedded into the story of the play.”

Pier Carlo: So you must have started in on casting discussions long before another playwright with a new play would.

Misha: Yes. It was a year-and-a-half-long national casting search. We worked with TBD Casting, and there was an initial casting round that happened for a sort of radio-play version of the first act that we did as a capstone to that first-year residency that I did at Soho Rep.

It really was like we were just turning over every stone everywhere that we possibly could, reaching out on a super-grassroots community way to all kinds of folks that do community theater or amateur Bengali theater. And self-tapes from young actors who were still in college or graduating from college and tapping into all of my own community relationships. 

The fact that we have found this cast is, to me, still the greatest marvel because this is a cast of Bengali folks who represent the entire constellation of what it means to be Bengali. It’s a super intergenerational cast. There are folks who were born and raised in Bangladesh or in India and folks who were born and raised here. There are queer and trans and non-binary actors in the cast. There are, I already mentioned, Bangladeshi versus West Bengali actors. Each of those considerations are crucial to the storytelling.

These actors are so exquisite, and almost none of them have had the opportunity to work in this particular way before, to run a show for the better part of a year. 

Pier Carlo: For eight shows a week, right?

Misha: Yeah. Eight shows a week here in Brooklyn. Yeah, it’s wild. And now they’re all Drama Desk Award-winning actors, which is nuts and so deserved. That is maybe what I’m most proud of, that the play is proving that there are artists out there who are so immensely talented that can step into a meaty, juicy, rich role like this if one is written for their particular concerns and considerations. That’s not why I was writing the play, but it is a collateral effect that I feel so amazed by.

Pier Carlo: I want to talk about writing a bilingual play. When I used to work in the theater, we did occasionally produce bilingual plays that were partly Spanish, partly in English.

Misha: Sure, yeah.

Pier Carlo: And I found that so many of our English-speaking audiences were cowed a bit and uncomfortable in a way that was not interesting to them, which was frustrating to me as a dramaturg. I think part of that is also because Spanish has a different weight in this country, I think, than Bangla for several reasons.

Misha: Totally, of course.

Pier Carlo: I’m curious about how you massaged the play so that an audience would feel unsettled when needed and comfortable when needed. Because you sometimes use subtitles and sometimes not.

Misha: That’s exactly right. That tradition of bilingual theater in Spanish and English is the womb from which I come. My mentor Cherríe Moraga was the one who first encouraged me to write in my mother tongue, and I think it took me 20 years to heed that encouragement.

I thought a lot about whether or not the intention behind the play was to make evident when certain audience members had a particular kind of access and when they didn’t, whether it was going to be written into the dramaturgy of the play that this moment was specifically for Bangla-speaking audience members and not for Anglo audience members. But I decided early on that I wasn’t actually ... . I was like, “This is a thing that we see in cinema all the time. Really I’m just trying to write a subtitled foreign language film, but it’s a play.” In the sense that I didn’t want to point at the ways in which the play was bilingual; I just wanted to write the play in precisely the languages that would naturally be spoken by these characters over the course of the 10 days that they are there.

Then once I had done that, I didn’t write the play with translation at first. I just wrote it in Bangla and English, as it would be. Then I made some subtle decisions around when we would be subtitling and when we wouldn’t be subtitling, not to make any kind of commentary about deliberately alienating or inviting certain audience members into that moment but more to craft which scene was from which character’s point of view.

So we have Raheem, who is the Black American boyfriend who arrives in Calcutta. It felt important to me that there were certain scenes in which the non-Bangla-speaking audience members were having his experience of the play, because that’s what the scene was about, his experience. 

Pier Carlo: Right. For a non-Bangla speaker, he’s our proxy in a way.

Misha: Exactly, a hundred percent. 

Pier Carlo: I think part of what’s wonderful about the play is that you don’t know when a non-Bangla-speaking audience will respond to a moment. It’s not necessarily in the translation, right?

Misha: No.

Pier Carlo: I think that’s a discovery for the audience of being like, “That moment when they were speaking Bangla to each other, and I didn’t know exactly what they said really moved me.” Right?

Misha: A hundred percent, yeah. Absolutely.

Pier Carlo: Or, “I totally understood it. Even though I didn’t get the words, I totally got it.”

Misha: And there’s a kind of alchemy in the audience itself because every audience has some Bangla-speaking audience members and some non-Bangla-speaking audience members, so there is a kind of a tension that is happening where audiences, based on their fluency, are digesting and receiving information at different tempos. That delay or that sense of coming to an understanding at a different time than another audience member is this beautiful rhythm that I’m always cognizant of in the audience.

Pier Carlo: What advice would you have for playwrights who want to write a bilingual or trilingual play but are feeling nervous about it?

Misha: At this point in the life of the American theater, I wouldn’t worry so much about the audience-and-access questions because I do think as far as film is concerned, we’re living in the era of “Minari,” and there is a sense of the expansiveness of what it means to tell an American story in multiple languages.

I think the risk for me at least has more to do with pulling our punches and not being as rigorous about how authentically we write in the languages that we want to write in an effort to “make accessible.” I think it is always possible to make a thing that is written in any number of languages accessible. I’m thinking about the way that subtitles were used in “Pachinko,” the Apple TV+ series, where there were different colors for Korean and for Japanese and we were dealing with a story that had to do with Korean folks in Japan and that very complicated linguistic geography was sort of crucial to the storytelling.

I think we can do all of that now as long as we are attentive to all of those different registers of speaking, to how different a Bangla that is spoken by someone who moved to the states at a particular age is from the Bangla that is spoken by somebody who was schooled in a Bangla-medium school versus an English-medium school. Just acknowledging the fact that every single character in a play speaks a different language, even if it’s just an English-speaking play. We can’t be like, “Oh, it’s a bilingual play, so there’s Bangla and English.” There’s like seven different languages in “Public Obscenities” and even more by virtue of how many characters and how many different codes they speak in.

Pier Carlo: Is the queerness in the play received differently by, let’s say, Indian or Bangladeshi audience members versus non-Bangladeshi? 

Misha: Yeah, that’s a great question. I do think that for us in the Bengali community or in the South Asian community, what the play is doing around queerness is something that we perhaps haven’t seen in the Bangla theater or in theater both on the subcontinent or here in the diaspora. I think that we’re bringing characters onto stage that haven’t been heard in our community’s theater-making.

I think I’ve said this before, but I think for non-Bangla speaking audience members, the play is new and radical because it is bilingual. But I think for Bangla-speaking audience members, they’re encountering a whole host of new languages by virtue of the fact that there are registers of queer Bangla and queer American language that appear in the play. The language of Grindr, the vernacular that … .

I can never experience the play as a non-Bangla speaker, and so for me, what’s moving and radical about it is not its bilingual nature. It’s about the other languages that are bubbling up for the first time inside of it.

Pier Carlo: As you know, so much has been written about the crisis that American theater is facing, not so much in New York but I think particularly in regional theaters and in smaller towns. As an artist, you’ve been creating unconventional, fascinating fare, including musicals, and you do a lot of collaborations.

As you survey the field, what’s your prognosis for your own prospects within it? And as you hear from colleagues, actors, directors, designers, what do you think theaters around the country need to get paying audiences to return?

Misha: I don’t know. I think I can answer it from my own point of view around making this piece. I think that it was a real revelation to me that what seemed like an enormous risk in terms of payoff for an off-Broadway theater ... . “Public Obscenities” is in many ways really far from what people think of as a Soho Rep production. It is a three-hour-long play with a 15-minute intermission. It is a kind of patient, naturalistic piece of theater. It’s a bilingual play with a massive cast. It’s certainly not the kind of production that anyone who is trying to play it safe in terms of how their audiences would receive a piece of theater in the 2022/2023 season ... it’s not a play that anyone would have in their right mind chosen to do. 

And then it has been such a runaway hit, in terms of bringing audiences to the theater and expanding the scope of the theater’s audience. I thought that that was never going to happen. I had less faith than the folks at Soho Rep did, in some ways. I was like, “You’re not bringing these Bengalis from Kensington and Jackson Heights out to downtown Manhattan to come and see this play in your 65-seat theater.” I guess the takeaway from how the play took off is that I think that there is a kind of hunger for ... . I mean, I think we do need to cultivate new audiences and make work that invites folks to our theaters who haven’t felt welcomed into those theaters before, certainly.

Then as an artist, I think it also does have to do with — how do I say this? — attention to audiences. Certainly, that’s how I operate, and I think that is my director’s training speaking, that I always think of myself as an audience proxy. I’m certainly stretching audiences with what I’m doing in the play, but I think it also feels important to me that as an artist I’m thinking about how what I am making is really pulling audiences towards the work rather than delivering a certain kind of thesis. I don’t feel I have any kind of answers as an artist that I’m trying to teach, that I have some sort of anointed wisdom that I’m trying to deliver through my work to audiences. It feels important to me that I approach audiences with a certain kind of humility. Whether or not folks like the work, my hope is that they don’t feel preached to, that there’s an invitation inside of the work that has been bringing folks to the theater.

I know I’m not answering the grand institutional questions through that, but it’s a thing that I’m able to think about on a small scale a little bit more practically. The big thing that I would say is I don’t think we are going to revitalize the theater by playing it safe. I think that if anyone is going to come back to the theater now that had never been a theatergoer or that had left their theatergoing behind pre-pandemic, those folks are going to come back because there’s something that they have never seen before that is being offered to them. That’s what I think at least, but I’m not the one who’s holding the reins.

Pier Carlo: You’ve also been a teacher, teaching nascent artists. How would you prepare a student to be a theater artist in America today? 

Misha: I think that it’s a strange moment for young artists coming up. I think a lot about young artists of color, young queer artists, who may feel — and I have felt this in myself — that there are certain expectations that are projected onto them around who they are supposed to be as an artist and what they are supposed to make. I think that there’s a sort of ethical burden that sometimes marginalized or minoritarian young artists are asked to shoulder.

Pier Carlo: Right, being a standard-bearer.

Misha: Yes, and to be doing some kind of political labor with a capital P or that they are constantly working on behalf of, that I find to be a stifling sensibility that I would ... . I think that we are always, for better or for worse, speaking on behalf of when we come from communities that haven’t been represented in the cultural landscape as much as others. But I think that if we trust ourselves to make work that is challenging our own community or communities, if we are challenging ourselves in the work that we are making and challenging our communities, that is actually ... .

Had I been afraid of what narrative I was projecting about the Bangali universe to American audiences when I was writing “Public Obscenities,” I never would have written this particular play. I think that it has been heartening to discover that through that age-old “specificity is universality” approach to things, showing rather than telling for lack of a better phrase ... . There’s all kinds of uncomfortable stuff that I’m talking about in “Public Obscenities” that certainly I was worried Bengali audience members might be like, “How dare you? This is the first Bangla-language play that is premiering at this scale on a professional American stage — “

Pier Carlo: “ — and you’re showing it to American audiences; what are you saying about us?” kind of thing?

Misha: Yeah. And that just hasn’t been the experience, even though the content of it could certainly have elicited that kind of reaction. I think that has to do with do with that kind of subtle listening and paying attention that is what animates that content in the play. It’s not that I’m trying to change anyone’s mind, both within the community or without the community. I actually have no idea what I want any of my audience members to feel about a queer person or a Bangla-speaking person or a queer Bengali person. That’s not what’s the engine inside of the play. 

I think that I would just encourage young artists to listen to themselves and trust that that listening will lead them towards something that allows their audience to listen more effectively than worrying about ... . I get asked a lot, “What do you want the audience to take away?” and that question always befuddles me. I have ineffable answers to that question around what I want the audience to take away, but I don’t think it’s ever what we imagine. I think if we’re thinking too hard about, “This is how I want my audience to feel about me or about this character or this character that is a proxy of me or my people or my community,” then that character will just flatten in a way that won’t serve that relationship that we’re trying to build between the work and an audience. I guess that’s what I would say.