The first scene of Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s “Public Obscenities,” remounted at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience after its exquisite début at the smaller Soho Rep last year, features a flood of language: English and Bangla, spoken simultaneously, without supertitles, at white-water speeds. A Bengali family at dinner is pressing food on an American guest, as his bilingual boyfriend translates between them. The familiarity of this exchange— the guest’s politeness, the hosts’ inquisitiveness, the affectionate comedy of homecoming—functions like bedrock under the tumult of two languages.
Chowdhury, a librettist, poet, director, and experimental theatre-maker from the fringe, has turned to finegrained realism for his first major play, and his ease with destabilization has, paradoxically, given this multilingual production an extraordinary steadiness. After that initial, hectic scene, the pace slows to a patient andante, but, though the play runs about three hours (and begins to include supertitles), it does not drag. Along with last year’s similarly unhurried “Infinite Life,” by Annie Baker, and “Stereophonic,” by David Adjmi, “Public Obscenities” has made New York a sudden paradise for stately, naturalistic, complexly layered masterworks.
Denne historien er fra February 05, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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Denne historien er fra February 05, 2024-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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LIFE ADVICE WITH ANIMAL ANALOGIES
Go with the flow like a dead fish.
CONNOISSEUR OF CHAOS
The masterly musical as mblages of Charles Ives
BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS
How the Brothers Grimm sought to awaken a nation.
THE ARTIFICIAL STATE
A different kind of machine politics.
THE HONEST ISLAND GREG JACKSON
Craint did not know when he had come to the island or why he had come.
THE SHIPWRECK DETECTIVE
Nigel Pickford has spent a lifetime searching for sunken treasure-without leaving dry land.
THE HOME FRONT
Some Americans are preparing for a second civil war.
PRESIDENT FOR SALE
On a mid-October Sunday not long ago sun high, wind cool-I was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a book festival, and I took a stroll.
SYRIA'S EMPIRE OF SPEED
Bashar al-Assad's regime is now a narco-state reliant on sales of amphetamines.
TUCKER EVERLASTING
Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.