Public Obscenities (2024)

TFANA and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company
Present
Soho Rep and the NAATCO National Partnership Project’s
Public Obscenities

Public Obscenities explores the pleasures and pitfalls of living in translation as it follows a queer studies PhD student returning to his family home in Kolkata with his Black American boyfriend.

This “gorgeously precise” (The New Yorker) bilingual production enjoyed a successful run earlier this year at Soho Rep, where it was named a Critic’s Pick in a New York Times review describing with Chowdhury as “a writer with great promise.”

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer and director based in Brooklyn. A Mark O’Donnell Prize and Princess Grace Award recipient, Misha was an inaugural Project Number One Artist at Soho Rep, where he recently directed the world premiere of his playwriting debut Public Obscenities “with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism” (New York Times, Critic’s Pick). Co-produced by Soho Rep and NAATCO, Public Obscenities was nominated for three Drama League and four Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Direction, and the cast won the Drama Desk Ensemble Award for embodying “the transnational world” of Misha’s “bilingual play with memorable authenticity, remarkable specificity, and extraordinary warmth.” Misha is also a Jonathan Larson Grant awardee for his body of work writing musical theater with composer Laura Grill Jaye; their as yet unproduced musical How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award in honor of Adam Schlesinger and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Misha was also a collaborator on the Grammy-winning album Calling All Dawns. Other recent collaborations: Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special; MukhAgni (Under the Radar @ The Public Theater) with Kameron Neal. A Sundance Fellow, Misha is the creator of VICHITRA, a series of short films including Englandbashi (Ann Arbor Film Festival); The Other Other (Ars Nova); An Anthology of Queer Dreams (Audio Unbound Award finalist); and In Order to Become (The Bushwick Starr). A NYSCA/NYFA, Fulbright, and Kundiman fellow in poetry, Misha has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Residencies: Hermitage, Ucross, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, SPACE on Ryder Farm, NYTW 2050, The Public’s Devised Theater Working Group, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab, New York Stage and Film, Drama League, Mercury Store, BRIC. BA: Stanford. MFA: Columbia.

Design by Paul Davis Studio / Mo Hinojosa

Deloitte is the 2023-2024 Season Sponsor.

Principal support for Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs is provided by the Bay and Paul Foundations, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene Foundation Fund in the New York Community Trust, The SHS Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, and The Thompson Family Foundation.

Theatre for a New Audience’s season and programs are also made possible, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities; Shakespeare in American Communities, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.