Public Obscenities

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

A complex and compelling bilingual play that examines the intersections of queerness and Indian-American identity.

When Indian-American graduate student Choton travels from the U.S. to his family’s home city of Kolkata to film interviews with the local queer community, he relishes acting as the local expert, especially in his role as interpreter between Bangla and English for his filmmaker boyfriend. Soon, though, Choton starts to question not only what he thinks he knows about queerness in India, but what both queerness and his Indian heritage mean for him. When a rediscovered roll of film reveals surprisingly intimate photographs of Choton’s austere grandfather (taken by whom?), Choton’s understanding of his family, both living and dead, starts to unravel. What follows is a mesmerizing examination of intercultural identity, asking audiences to reconsider what we mean when we call a place home.

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.

Chowdhury is also a poet whose work has been published in The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Asian American Literary Review, Lantern Review and elsewhere. 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.