Homebody/Kabul Written by Tony Kushner Directed by Declan Donnellan At New York Theatre Workshop in New York Rating: **
Playwright Tony Kushner seems to have better timing than a Catskills comic. Homebody/Kabul, which opened last night in New York's East Village, is a lengthy exploration of Afghanistan and its relationship with the West during the reign of the Taliban. The world is so convulsed over that recently departed regime that Homebody is probably the first U.S. play in decades to be able to traffic in the intricate history of a foreign country without the need to provide an audience with footnotes. We've got CNN instead.
Illustrating how parched the American landscape is for political theatre, Homebody even arrives with its own U.S. National Endowment for the Arts controversy. Word is that the NEA has denied funding to a Berkeley theatre that intended to produce the play in April over what Kushner suggests may be the "political anxiety" of the times.
Did Kushner, who began writing the play three years ago, really luck out with his timing? For perhaps the first time in history, North America is sensitized to the repressive, murderous horrors of a place such as Afghanistan in August, 1998, when the play is set. But since the past Sept. 11, are we like a jury pool tainted by overexposure to the facts of a high-profile murder case? Can we get beyond the current war and its politics to glimpse the art in Homebody?
The New York Theatre Workshop, whose mandate is provocative work and which also gave birth to the Broadway successes Rent and Dirty Blonde, sits less than two miles from ground zero. Three months ago, we might have nodded sympathetically in reflexive Western guilt upon hearing a Taliban soldier decry American aggression, or a British NGO worker speak of horrific conditions in refugee camps that steeled the Taliban resolve. And now?
Kushner writes full-length plays so rarely that Homebody is his first since the epic-length, two-parter Angels in America in the early 1990s. It has some of the same reach as Angels, running 3:45 hours, and it, too, aims to comfortably mingle grand political ideas with intimate personal stories and a touch of magic.
The Homebody of the title is a genially talkative Londoner in her mid-40s who has been seduced by the exotic allure of Kabul's tortured history. She recounts the region's 5,000 years of tumult, aided by a decades-old guidebook that cheerily goes through one bloody conquest after another. She delightedly notes that Adam's son, Cain, is said to be buried in the ancient city: Evil came here to die.
Interwoven into this exegesis is a brief tale of her own, about the day she left her house for a junky Afghani store in another part of London and hallucinated an affair with a swarthy shopkeeper (echoes of Alan Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils monologue) who lost three fingers to an axe in Afghanistan. She is enraptured with the idea of Kabul, a place where magic still lives because it has not yet been corrupted by the hard logic of Western thought. All of her knowledge comes from books.
This 45-minute monologue was the play's genesis, and it contains its most whipsaw, enticing writing. Linda Emond is such a dynamic delight as the Homebody, consumed with her story and yet endearingly self-effacing, that what follows is a pale letdown.
Kushner takes us through the looking glass and into Kabul itself, where the unnamed Homebody apparently went on vacation. Arriving from London, her uptight husband, Milton, and hot-headed daughter, Priscilla, are informed that she has been killed, torn apart in fact, perhaps by a mob offended by her immodest (non-burka) dress. There's a mystery, though: Her body has disappeared.
Priscilla takes off through the streets of Kabul to find her mother's corpse, while Milton makes friends with a British NGO worker harbouring a penchant for heroin, and succumbs to the drug's pleasures.
This is a kaleidoscopic landscape, both surreal and shockingly concrete, a place where a Tajik man breaks into Frank Sinatra songs and a poet writes in Esperanto because that international language is free of history and therefore free of repression. Kushner is playing with themes of homelessness and statelessness, and wondering aloud if purely logical means of communication such as the Dewey decimal system and binary code aren't both hopeful and sad.
An artist himself, he sympathizes with those who fight for something they believe in, yet are willing to be unsettled by the convictions of others. "I get the appeal of fascism now. . . . Uncertainty kills," Priscilla says. An Afghani woman responds, "As does certainty." Homebody/Kabul continues at the New York Theatre Workshop until Feb. 10. For ticket information: 212-239-6200.
Simon Houpt