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Finalist: Public Obscenities, by Shayok Misha Chowdhury

A densely written, deeply-felt drama that examines identity, home, queerness, and language through the lens of a Bengali American reuniting with his family in India.

Nominated Work

Public Obscenities

Production trailer. (SoHo Rep./Woolly Mammoth Theatre/NAATCO National Partnership Project)

He “became a picture.” That’s what we say when somebody dies. Chhobi hoye giyechhe.

Say it again?

Chhobi hoye giyechhe.

Choton relishes being the translator, toggling nimbly between Bangla and English, Grindr and academese. But when he returns to his grandfather’s house in Kolkata with his boyfriend Raheem, an unexpected discovery leaves Choton at the limits of language.

Public Obscenities is a bilingual play from writer-director Shayok Misha Chowdhury about the things we see, the things we miss, and the things that turn us on.

-- from Soho Rep.’s production page

Biography

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer and director, born in India, based in Brooklyn. He received an Obie Award for directing the world premiere of his bilingual play, PUBLIC OBSCENITIES, at Soho Rep. The “literary marvel” was a New York Times Critic's Pick and named in The New Yorker's Best Theatre of 2023. Misha is also the recipient of a Princess Grace Award, The Mark O’Donnell Prize, Drama Desk and Drama League nominations, a Jonathan Larson Grant, and the Relentless Award for his musical HOW THE WHITE GIRL GOT HER SPOTS AND OTHER 90s TRIVIA. He was a collaborator on the Grammy-winning album CALLING ALL DAWNS. Other favorites: BROTHER, BROTHER (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special; MUKHAGNI (Under the Radar @ The Public) with Kameron Neal. Misha is also a Sundance Fellow and the creator of VICHITRA, a series of short films rooted in queer South Asian imagination. A Fulbright, Kundiman, and NYSCA/NYFA fellow, Misha’s poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

Winners

Prize Winner in Drama in 2024:

Eboni Booth

A simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community. Drama

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Drama in 2024:

Moisés Kaufman and Amanda Gronich

An elegant and harrowing work of documentary theater that examines the provenance of a photo album from Auschwitz and probes the unsolvable mystery of how individuals can insist on normalcy while atrocity lurks outside the frame.

The Jury

Janice Simpson(Chair)

Former Director, Arts Journalism Program, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY

Lisa Fung

Writer, Los Angeles & New York City

Lily Janiak

Theater Critic, San Francisco Chronicle

Tracy Letts*

Playwright, Bedford, N.Y.

Chay Yew

Stage Director/Playwright, New York City

Winners in Drama

Sanaz Toossi

A quietly powerful play about four Iranian adults preparing for an English language exam in a storefront school near Tehran, where family separations and travel restrictions drive them to learn a new language that may alter their identities and also represent a new life.

James Ijames

A funny, poignant play that deftly transposes "Hamlet" to a family barbecue in the American South to grapple with questions of identity, kinship, responsibility, and honesty.

Katori Hall

A funny, deeply felt consideration of Black masculinity and how it is perceived, filtered through the experiences of a loving gay couple and their extended family as they prepare for a culinary competition.

Michael R. Jackson

A metafictional musical that tracks the creative process of an artist transforming issues of identity, race, and sexuality that once pushed him to the margins of the cultural mainstream into a meditation on universal human fears and insecurities.

2024 Prize Winners

Staff of Reuters

For an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.