How wonderful, in my line of work, to be able to usher in the New
Year by celebrating Tony Kushner’s great new play of our anguished times, Homebody/Kabul . I cannot think of a more
important drama in the last decade-since, in fact, the same awesomely
articulate dramatist astonished us with his vast epic of the 90’s, Angels in America . His new play is a
magnificent achievement on every challenging,deeply compassionate level. It
confirms Mr. Kushner’s place-if confirmation beneeded-asour
leadingplaywright,to whom attention will always gladly be paid.
Restassured,he must bedoingsomething right when The Wall Street Journal dismisses Homebody/Kabul as something sordid that
“might as well have been created by a Taliban playwright.” Mullah Kushner, the
mad warlord of Off Broadway, has firstly created a fantastic act of dramatic
clairvoyancy by setting the heart of the play in Afghanistan in 1998-2000.
There’s nothing opportunistic about this. It was written before Sept. 11 (and
Mr. Kushner has always taken an interest in a world beyond the safely, cozily
bourgeois). There are some scary moments. An educated Muslim woman, driven to
the edge of madness in Kabul during the era of American support for the
Taliban, threatens a Westerner: “You love the Taliban so much, bringthemtoNew York! Well,don’tworry, they’re coming to New York! Americans!”
But the ghostly timelinessoftheplay shouldn’t blind us to its
enduring value. In the drama’s narrative sweep and ambition, in its muted
yearning and desperate sense of search, Homebody/Kabul
is a journey without maps to the ravaged, symbolic center of a fucked-up
universe. Mr. Kushner, whose epic dramas are within the state-of-the-nation
tradition of George Bernard Shaw, links a public debate about the state of the
world to private wounds. (What saves Mr. Kushner from becoming another Shaw,
for one is surely enough, is his Jewish humanism). The troubled, lost
Westerners within Homebody/Kabul are
as much at endless war with themselves, and each other, as Afghanistan is the
hell on earth where people forget even their own names.
As always with this playwright of ideas and commitment, the play
compels us to look freshly at tinderbox issues that exist on several intriguing
levels. Homebody/Kabul is about lost
civilizations and unsolvable paradoxes, furious differences and opposites and
disintegrating, rotting pidgin cultures. It’s about desolation and love in
land-mined places, child murderers and fanatics, tranquilized existence and
opium highs, travel in the largest sense of the word-travel of the mind and
soul. To where? An unknowable mystery, perhaps, where all confusion is
banished. “A door marked nevermore that was not there before,” as the Afghan
fan of the golden songs of Sinatra puts it. “It is hard you will find to be
narrow of mind.”
Homebody/Kabul is also,
most crucially, about the clashing symbol and Babel of language itself. The
dreamy, seductive opening monologue of the eccentric middle-aged British lady
known only as the Homebody is dizzy with the pleasure of words. “Oh, I love the
world!” she declares (though that it isn’t strictly true). “I love love love
love the world!” But what this warm, dotty, intellectual misfit on antidepressants
loves more than anything is the power of words and the joy they give her. She
happily drowns in them, the more arcane the better, as if in search of lost
meaning.
Her mess of a daughter, Priscilla-adrift in her early 20’s after
a suicide attempt at 18-is angrily inarticulate and coarse. Words go sour on
her; they are of no use. Her unloving father, a repressed Britisher in his 40’s
named Milton, is a computer engineer whose science “joins the opposites.” But
then, the language of science invariably befuddles the layman.
During the play, we hear the opposing foreign tongues of Pashto,
Dari, French and, of course, English, when no one can literally make themselves
understood, except in watery translation. Language loses its meaning, corrupted
and of all vitality and life, like
ethnic cleansing. The near-mad Afghan woman, Mahala, is a librarian in a
ravaged land without libraries. She has forgotten even the syllables of her own
language. The Tajik Afghan poet and guide, Khwaja, writes in the dead universal
language of Esperanto, a language without history-“and hence,” he explains
dryly, “no history of oppression.” And the Sufi marabout we meet along the way
is in search of a lost language of paradise, a path to knowledge and
understanding where words might be reborn in innocence.
At the surprising outset, Mr. Kushner throws down an ace with the
Homebody’s hour-long monologue, saturated with its dazzling distractions and
erudition. Has there ever been an opening to a major play like it? “Our story
begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 B.C.,” the British lady in the
string of pearls begins, reading in her witty, animated way from an outdated
1965 guidebook about the ancient city of Kabul. There will be certain
scintillating diversions from her fluttery guided tour, most dramatically in
her breathtaking description of the day she purchased 10 festive party hats
made by people who believe in magic.
In the tiny London souvenir store, the Homebody imagines or
experiences-for both can be one and the same thing-that she can speak fluent
Pashto and, led by the maimed Afghan hat-seller to Kabul, makes love to him.
Wonderfully acted by Linda Emond, who’s just about as perfect as any actress
can be, the monologue closes with her eccentric Homebody singing along to
Sinatra’s “It’s Nice to Go Trav’ling.” “Such an awful awful man, such perfect
perfect music! A paradox!” she announces, only to stagger us again by turning
to a 17th-
century Persian love poem touched by the unearthly strangeness and beauty of
Kabul:
I sing to the gardens of
Kabul;
Even Paradise is jealous of
their greenery.
The Homebody/Kabul
opening has been compared approvingly by some to the Talking Heads monologues of Alan Bennett, which is like comparing
Mr. Kushner to the Queen Mother. Mr. Bennett is a beloved, eccentric British
miniaturist whose specialty is the theater of social embarrassment. Eroticism
isn’t within his narrowly appealing repertoire, nor the dangerous, fabulist
dreams that go to the central mystery of Mr. Kushner’s drama, which next takes
flight with the apparent death of the Homebody while visiting Kabul.
Was she hacked to pieces, caught in the crossfire of history when
President Clinton began bombing Afghanistan? Or is this urban romantic of drab
suburban London still alive? Is she a Muslim convert, now voluntarily devoid of
books-words!-her music-Sinatra!-and all things Western? Is she married to an
Afghan?
The second and third acts take us in search of the answers when
Homebody’s daughter, Priscilla (Kelly Hutchinson, exactly right as the shrill,
graceless brat), searches for the body of her mother. Mr. Kushner is often at
his vivid best with characters for whom he has the least sympathy. Remember Roy
Cohn, the Antichrist of Angels in America ?
The stoned, confessional scenes between Homebody’s husband, Milton, and the
dissolute, self-obliterating Quango, the opium addict and unofficial liaison
for the British government in Kabul, are brilliantly performed by Dylan Baker
and Bill Camp, respectively. It’s like watching a meltdown of the damned.
There’s so much fine work to admire here: the sly, dry humor of
Yusef Bulos’ Tajik poet (and spy); the overwhelming tragedy of Sean T.
Krishnan’s Zai, in mourning for his homeland, as well as Mr. Krishnan’s
portrait of the marabout-for all such quests must have a Wise Man-who guards
the mythical grave of Cain in a valley of mines. The meeting between the
marabout and an ashamed Priscilla is particularly affecting; the dignified,
frightening authority of Firdous Bamji’s mullah could scarcely be better; and
the shattering performance of Rita Wolf as Mahala, the Muslim librarian driven
mad by Taliban killers-“I have nothing to read!”-brims with tears of unbearable
emotion.
I have done less than justice
to the director, Declan Donnellan, and his longtime designer, Nick Ormerod. The
most gifted Mr. Donnellan directed Angels
in America to great acclaim in London at the Royal National Theater. An
early disciple of Peter Brook, the internationalism of Homebody/Kabul holds no fear for him. His assured sense of rhythm,
the energy and pulse of the entire piece, are a tribute to his generous talent.
I have run out of space and superlatives. At close to four hours
with two intermissions, Homebody/Kabul
(at the New York Theater Workshop) isn’t for the Mamma Mia! crowd, obviously. But in such company as this, time
doesn’t matter. Besides, we all know of the 80-minute drama that lasts an
eternity. I must report I’ve rarely experienced a theater audience listening so
intently to a play that you can hear the silence-as if we, too, need to better
understand the world and grieve under its convulsive, weary weight.
As I say, Tony Kushner’s Homebody/
Kabul is the most remarkable play in a decade-without doubt the most
important of our time.
