“Rheology is the science of how matter responds to external stresses.Classically, solids and liquids have distinct rheologies: defined by the presence or absence of a preferred pattern. Fragile matter does not fit within that paradigm because it lives at the margin of being a solid”

This is how I start the narration in the last scene of the play “Rheology”, which ran at the off-Broadway theater, Bushwick Starr from April 15 – May 17, 2025: 22 performances. On stage, were my son, who directed and wrote the play, and I.

In Theatres: Rheology

I am a theoretical condensed matter physicist.I started out in the field of hard-condensed matter but my path meandered into soft matter in the early 1990s. For the past two decades, I have been obsessed with systems whose proximity to jamming defines their rheology. My son, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is an Obie award winning theater director and one of three Pulitzer finalists in Drama in 2024. About five years ago, he and I started having a conversation about my research and what rheology means. Soon, our conversation drifted to a video recording of my mother reciting the first poem by the Bengali Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. The poem is from the point of view of groundwater that’s been trapped underground inside a mountain for eons.Until, suddenly, one day a pinprick of morning sunlight penetrates the cave and wakes it up. Visualized as a woman in the poem, the groundwater remembers that who she really is a waterfall.Looking for a way out, she slams against the rocks, causing an avalanche. An avalanche that causes a massive solid mountain that has been solid for so long to disintegrate. Avalanches are core to how fragile solids respond to external stresses and define their rheology. This recording of my mother became the seed of a five-year project that culminated in the staging of Rheology this spring.