Public Obscenities

‘It is a testament to Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s gifts as a writer that he is able to evoke as many themes, histories and possibilities as he does… leave his audience not dazed or frustrated, but longing for even more… Chowdhury is a writer with great promise who may have found himself on the brink of greatness’

‘A stately, naturalistic, complexly layered masterwork… As a writer, Chowdhury interweaves humor, allusion, gravity, and extended metaphor as if each quality were a musical line, making an integrated, symphonic whole’

‘Gripping and enthralling… Through the act of filmmaking, the play asks the viewer to interrogate their relationships between what is hidden and what is shown, the lens with which we view ourselves and our families, and how the act of translation can bring us together, even as they seemingly keep us apart’

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a writer and director based in Brooklyn. His play Public Obscenities, which he also directed, premiered in the spring of 2023 at Soho Rep in a co-commission with NAATCO. Misha was also awarded a Jonathan Larson Grant for his body of work writing musicals with composer Laura Grill Jaye; their most recent collaboration, How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award.

Chowdhury is the creator of VICHITRA, a series of sound-driven, cinematic experiments, including Englandbashi, The Other Other, An Anthology of Queer Dreams, and In Order to Become, which he is developing into a live Carnatic opera.

He has taught and directed at Stanford University, Brown University, New York University, California Institute of the Arts, Fordham University, Syracuse University, University of the Arts, Hunter College, Carnegie-Mellon University, and Williams College.

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