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Allison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Allison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, we'll take a look at the new streaming series adaptation of the novel Daisy Jones and the Six with the executive producer and showrunner, as well as the team who put together the music for the show, so important to the show and we'll play some tracks. Another great novel was made into a stirring movie. We'll hear from screenwriter and director Sarah Polley and actor Jesse Buckley about Women Talking, which is up for best picture at the Oscars.

In our big picture series highlighting those who work behind the camera, our guest will be Oscar-nominee composer, Hauschka, will join us to discuss his work on All Quiet on the Western Front. That is the plan for today, so let's get this started with the play Public Obscenities.

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A new bilingual play demonstrates both beauty and limitations of language. The play written in English and Bengali is titled Public Obscenities. The title is a reference to the Indian penal code, which is cited in the play. The story follows Choton, a Bengali American PhD student, and his boyfriend Raheem, a Black American cinematographer as they stay at Choton's late grandfather's house in Kolkata, India. They are working on a documentary about the queer dating scene there and are looking for local interview subjects by reaching out on the gay dating app Grindr, but their communication is issue Choton doesn't know any queer slang and Raheem doesn't speak Bengali.

Throughout the show, we're introduced to a cast of characters as multiple stories begin to unfold, including Shou, who is Kothi and played by trans activist, Tashnuva Anan, who agrees to tell Choton all about growing up queer in Kolkata. Choton's aunt, I think it's Pishimoni and her husband Pishe, who is addicted to playing online pool, and Chitesh, who takes care of the family in house. Public Obscenities is running now at Soho Rep and has just been extended through April 9th. Writer and director Shayok Misha Chowdhury joins me now. Misha, first of all, congratulations on the extension. That's huge.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Thank you so much.

Allison Stewart: Welcome to the show all the way from India, correct?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: That's right, yes. Thank you for having me.

Allison Stewart: You're headed back to New York right after this interview, is that right?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: I am, yes. I leave in about five hours for the airport, so thanks for the timing, it worked out perfectly.

Allison Stewart: Safe travels to you.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Thank you.

Allison Stewart: I gave a lot of information at that intro, but the show is about a lot more. In your own words, what is Public Obscenities about?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Public Obscenities, it's about so many different things. It's a semiotic biographical play, I would certainly call it that. It's about language and translation and searching for feeling a sense of native belonging in a place when you are always between places. I think I was someone who grew up between Bengal and the United States and the experience of retaining a fluency in my mother tongue was a passport for me between both places, but there was always work that was required to prove that fluency. That's something that I'm exploring in the play for sure. It's about the porosity between private spaces and public spaces.

Right now, I'm calling in from my house in Kolkata, which, in many ways, is the inspiration for the play. I've had to send my cousin and her son and the woman who helps them out here in the house to the upstairs flat so that I could do this interview because there's so little privacy in these homes. That's something that is a big part of the play as well.

Allison Stewart: How did you know what the play was going to be about? When did you know you wanted to write about these subjects?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Actually, the inspiration for the play was a dream that my uncle told me that shows up verbatim in the play about midway through the piece. It was a dream that he told me, and in his dream, he was watching a movie in a movie theater and he wanted me to go make the movie. Instead of making that movie because I don't make movies, I make plays, I decided to write a play about that experience of receiving that dream from him and who gets to be an artist, and his feeling that he needed to hand that source material off to me because I'm an artist. I live in New York, he lives in this house here in Kolkata.

We knew I wanted to explore that source material, but then it really was a wandering process of writing. As I was writing these characters into being, it was one of those semi-cliched experiences that you hear writers talk about, where it's like, it felt like there was one story that these characters couldn't but live and I was just excavating it scene by scene. The plot really emerged out of the environment and the character. It wasn't a plot-first writing experience for me.

Allison Stewart: As you mentioned, it was semi-autobiographical. There's that dream, that idea of that dream is in the play, correct?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Yes. The dream is the real verbatim source material that I wanted to retain intact even though it's a fictional story. Even though the dream is autobiographical, the way that it shows up in the play is completely different than the way that it showed up in my life. In the play, it's a dream that is gifted to Raheem, who is the protagonist's boyfriend. It's an experience of this uncle character sharing this intimate part of himself with a person that he feels affinity towards but he's just met two days ago. He's sharing this dream in English which isn't his mother tongue.

The play is, in so many ways, about those kinds of slippages between what's able to be shared in the spaces between fluencies. It isn't always the people who speak the most fluently with one another that speak most truly to each other in the play.

Allison Stewart: We're discussing the play Public Obscenities, which is running at Soho Rep until April 9th. It's just been extended. My guest is Misha Chowdhury, the writer and director. The title Public Obscenities, as I mentioned, references an Indian penal code. How do Public Obscenities under this penal code relate to the story?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: That's a great question. The title of the play actually comes from a poem that I wrote when I was back here on a Fulbright back in 2009, 2010. At that time, I was coming into my own queer adult relationship to the city. Kolkata was always a place I returned to with my family. It was a place that I didn't have that public relationship too. I would go and spend a lot of time by this lake that is near my family's home, which, at the time, was a very popular queer cruising spot.

There is this law on the books that says that it's a vestige of the British penal code that is now codified in Indian law that says that any obscene act or obscene word uttered in public that offends the sensibilities of those people in the public space can be prosecuted under that law. Of course, that translates into many different kinds of behaviors. There were cases in which people have been prosecuted under that law for distributing awareness materials or just queer folks by virtue of the way that they present that in and of itself can be construed as obscene under that law. Then the title for me ends up being about so many different kinds.

In my family and in the culture that I grew up in, what are the different kinds of behaviors, thought practices, what kinds of things remain behind closed doors and have a halo of obscenity or unspeakable around them? Those are the questions that animate the play for me for sure.

Allison Stewart: This is a bilingual production in both Bangla and English, which means some characters speak exclusively in Bangla. We're going to play a little clip in a second so people can get a flavor of it, but why was that important to you in this production?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: In many ways, it's a play I've been wanting to write my whole life and I was terrified to do so because I was like, "How would we ever cast it? Who would come and see it in the US?" The reason that the languages operate the way they do in the play is because the play is very naturalistic and I was adamant about writing the play precisely the way that it would unfold in the languages that it would unfold in.

The choices that I make around accessibility in the language are more about when I choose to super title the Bangla for the English-speaking audience and when I don't, but the way that the spoken language unfolds is quite literally like they're speaking in Bangla and English because the American boyfriend is present and they're translating for him in the room when he's there, but when there isn't an English speaker in the room, the language is Bangla, the scene is in Bangla. It really is just about tapping into the authenticity of what calls for those quotes, which is in real-time in this environment.

Alison Stewart: Let's play a little clip so people can hear also how it's just organically woven into the story. The play opens in a bungalow with a dinner scene between Choton and his non-Bangla-speaking boyfriend, Raheem, who we've mentioned, and his aunt. First of all, what dynamic does Choton have with his family before we play this clip so people understand?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Choton operates as a translator that is constantly being this bridge person. He's working very hard to prove his fluency both in American English and in Bangla. He's constantly being that nimble translator, I would say.

Alison Stewart: This clip is of Choton and Raheem speaking with Choton's grandmother who's losing her memory due to old age and dementia. This is the second time Raheem meets her and she calls him pretty. Let's listen.

Choton: [Bangla language]

Choton's Grandmother: [Bangla language]

Choton: [Bangla language] She says [Bangla language].

Raheem: What's that?

Choton: She thinks you're pretty.

Choton's Grandmother: Handsome.

Choton: [Bangla language]

Choton's Grandmother: Handsome.

Choton: Handsome? [chuckles] Handsome. Do you want to borrow handsome [Bangla language]?

Alison Stewart: What does Raheem learn about his boyfriend through observing the family?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: That's a great question. I would be really interested to ask the actor who's playing Raheem what his experience of that is. I think that the play is, in so many ways, about, on a magnified level, what it's like to return home with one's partner. I think whenever we return home to a place that brings out a childness in a partner, we see a version of them that is radically different from the version that we've made a home with ourselves. I think that in this play, it's exacerbated by the fact that that home brings out this entire other language to self in Choton that Raheem has never really had access to.

There's a line in the second scene of the play when the two of them are alone for the first time under a mosquito net. There's a quiet moment that they were able to share with each other outside of the hustle and bustle of the family dynamic. Raheem talks about the fact that he's like, "Do you wish I spoke Bangla? I've never seen this. You have this whole other world that I've never had access to." I think it brings out certain insecurities in Raheem around his ability to connect with Choton if he doesn't speak that language that feels so important to Choton. I think the play for me in many ways is about Choton registering that Raheem is home for him in the most solid way.

Even though he wants so desperately to be at home in Kolkata, there's always a distance between him and that place that presents itself over the course of the play. I don't know if I answered the question.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I love that description because I think that's universal. I think it's really universal for people who have gone home with partners or even friends and seen that friend or partner in their environment where they grew up and where they had roots but maybe they don't feel as comfortable in that pot. They've outgrown the pot- [chuckles]

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Totally.

Alison Stewart: -to use the plant analogy.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Yes, absolutely. It reminded me a lot about, I was watching Junebug the film. It's just even somebody taking someone home to their southern family here in the US has a

completely different cultural valence that shows up in that film and was an inspiration for the play from me as well. Anyways, go ahead.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Misha Chowdhury. We're talking about Public Obscenities, his play, which is running at Soho Rep now through April 9th. You are the writer and the director of the play. As director, what did that writer do that made your job challenging?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Oh, man, everything. It's not a short play. I was really adamant with myself about separating the two roles, especially during the writing process. My training is as a director and I usually try to write things that I'm already envisioning in three dimensions to put up on stage, but I was pretty adamant about writing the play as a writer first without trying to write a thing that was easily translated into live theater. There's a live crow in the play and I was very angry with my writer self for having written that obstacle into the play. For a while, I was trying to figure out if we could get a live crow into the production.

It is those kinds of limitations or challenges that the writing presents that the director has to solve in creative ways. It was a very strange experience of having that conversation internally inside of myself, posing those challenges to myself, and then trying to solve them in real time.

Alison Stewart: Through Choton's research in Kolkata, we're introduced to a character named Shou, a local 20-something. Tell us a little bit about the character of Shou.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: This character, Shou, and it's a shortened version of a more common boy's name in Bengali, Shoupik, but Shou has self-styled as Shou as part of their gender exploration. I do think for me, it was really important to write, even for Bangla-speaking audiences both here in India and in Bangladesh and in the US, I think a character like Shou might be quite unfamiliar to a normative Bangla-speaking public because there is still a great deal of separation, but despite the fact that there is such a long history of differently gendered and queer lives and ways of living here in Bengal, the culture at large, I don't think has access to that other language that Shou speaks that Choton is romanticizing in strange ways and is trying to approach as a internal anthropologist.

Shou is just so excited about having the opportunity to share themselves with Choton in the context of his effort to make this documentary. I think that that is the third language of the play for me in many ways is this other queer Bangla life and language that Shou represents in the play that I wanted to be really diligent about being authentic toward in the play.

Alison Stewart: Would you introduce our audience to the person cast as Shou?

Shayok Misha Chowdhury: Yes. Tashnuva Anan, who is an incredible actor. I was so excited to cast them as Shou because they are a wonder in their own right. Tashnuva was the first transgender news anchor in Bangladesh and has only recently moved to the US, so it was a real gift to me that she was here in New York and willing and able to participate in the play. She really has been such a light in the production process and I've learned a great deal about the character from working with her because her lived experience is much closer to Shou's than my own, and so I feel like I was able to deepen the character through the work that we were doing together in the rehearsal room.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Misha Chowdhury. We are talking about his play Public Obscenities running at Soho Rep until April 9th. Photographs and photography is important to the story. The family finds an undeveloped roll of film in an old camera with photographs the family has never seen before and the audience doesn't see them either, but they're described. What went into that decision?

Misha Chowdhury: The process of writing that thread of the play was the most challenging for me. I knew early on that my own grandfather's old Rolleicord camera was this other primary source material in the writing of the play for me, but I had no idea that I wanted to write a play about discovering this role of undeveloped film. It was simply that the camera showed up, and then I was like, "We have to open the camera," so we opened the camera, and then, "There's got to be something inside. What's on the film?"

It was important to me that this grandfather figure that looms large in the family's imagination of itself was revealed to have a kind of other self, an internal life that the audience doesn't fully gain access to in the play, but we do see through the other characters' experiences of encountering these photographs that are a time capsule back to 30 years ago before the grandfather passed away, that they witnessed this. For the aunt, it's her father and she's never seen this side of him. The uncle talks about he knew him for 23 years, but he's never seen that expression on his face.

I played around for a very long time with whether there was this big great dramatic reveal that the photographs, whether they were serving that role in the plot of the play, but personally for me, my experience with that kind of revelation has always been just the subtlest seeing my grandfather at the age of 15 completely reorients my understanding of myself and who he was. It's that kind of a revelation.

Alison Stewart: Like I say, I didn't see the play, but I read it and it's amazing that you kept all the storylines straight. [chuckles]

Misha Chowdhury: I love it. I'm so glad you read it on the page.

Alison Stewart: It was very interesting to read it, I have to say. For people who want to see the play, it is at Soho Rep until April 9th. I've been speaking with its writer and director, Misha Chowdhury. Misha, safe travels back to New York.

Misha Chowdhury: Thank you so much for having me.

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