DEPTH OF FIELD

"Public Obscenities" triumphs Off Broadway.

- HELEN SHAW

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.