It helps to pronounce " Kabul " correctly when discussing what’s right and wrong with Tony Kushner’s unwieldy, ambitious, prescient, and provocative new Homebody/Kabul. Certainly the play seems " cobbled, " evolving as it does from a long monologue by a sheltered British housewife into a complex, cartoonish personal journey/political thriller set in the ancient Afghan city of the title.
Yet Kushner’s first major work since Angels in America is as splendid as it is disjointed, a grand Cuisinarting of history, politics, family disconnection, and vocabular audacity. And Trinity Repertory Company artistic director Oskar Eustis, who commissioned Angels and scored a coup in securing the first production of Homebody since its December premiere at New York Theatre Workshop, endeavors to make the crammed and busy work as seamless as possible. In Eugene Lee’s atmospheric set design, bombed-out Kabul floats like an Old World cloud into the woody Victorian environs of the sensibly shod logorrheic wife and mom called the Homebody. And certainly the play washes up on what it calls our " culpable shore " at an uncannily pertinent moment. Kushner, who began Homebody/Kabul in 1997 and sets it in 1998 and 1999, must be a diviner as well as a playwright, holding his rod over a map of the world until the stick quivers at a spot we have long ignored and no longer can.
" The private, and we must accept this, " the Homebody advises, " the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. " Later, speaking of the troubled daughter from whom she has withheld the " love-love-love " she affords the world, she adds, " Touch will corrupt what it doesn’t understand. " For Kushner, even before September 11, Afghanistan, its ancient culture rent by colonizing English, invading Soviets, an interfering CIA, and its own warring factions, symbolized the mutual corruption of East and West. In addition, Kabul proves hospitable poetic territory, being, among other distinctions, the reputed burial place of the Biblical Cain and the capital, according to the Human Index Rank, of the " fifth worst country in the world. "
Yet the marvel of Homebody/Kabul is that it merges the global with the personal, conjuring parallel tales of grief in which a bewildered husband and daughter mourn the Homebody, who may have met a violent death in Afghanistan, as the natives mourn the " populated disaster " that is their country. What the play does less well than Angels in America, where disparate characters meet on astral planes of fantasy, is marry the supposedly real to the surreal. Too much of the personal and political intrigue of the three-and-a-half-hour work’s second and third acts is potently loopy but unconvincing on a literal level.
The play begins with an hour-long monologue spoken directly to the audience by the Homebody, who’s seated in her London parlor between an antique globe and a shaded lamp. Emotionally repressed yet vigorously imaginative, fielding a vocabulary seemingly culled from James Joyce and William F. Buckley, she babbles like some genteel thesaurus on acid, intermittently reading rapturously from a 1965 guidebook to Kabul that she deems " irrelevant and irresistible. " At Trinity, this challenging tour de force is undertaken by long-time company member Anne Scurria, whose fine performance captures the tea-cozy character’s shy kookiness and minutiae-minded intelligence, as well as the deep, breezy sadness at her center.
All that follows might be interpreted as the fraught extension of a fantasy set in motion by the experience laboriously related by the Homebody in her monologue — of having ventured into a small shop in London to buy Afghan hats for a party. As she passed her credit card to the Afghan-immigrant merchant manning the junky little store, he took it with a hand from which three fingers had been neatly sheared. From there, the Homebody’s tale does indeed branch into sociopolitical and sexual fantasy. Suddenly fluent in Pashtu, she asks the merchant how he was maimed, and that produces a series of equally horrifying and plausible imaginary explanations. Whereupon the Homebody, drunk with the romance of the foreign, longing to escape the arid " garden of the private, " takes that ruined hand in hers and embarks with the Afghan on a fantasy tour of his native land that culminates in the pair’s making love beneath a chinar tree.
More likely we are meant to accept that the Homebody acted on her fantasy, taking off like Shirley Valentine for foreign climes to which her pinched computer-scientist husband and angry daughter pursue her. Whether she has been torn apart by anti-Western extremists, as the family are told by the Taliban, or has fled her kin to become the burqa-bound wife of a Muslim, as the daughter is conversely informed, isn’t so important. Early on, the father barks out that people don’t grow from tragedy, rather that it withers them. Homebody/Kabul proves him wrong, albeit through an adventure that sometimes veers between the fantastical and the incomprehensible.
Stuffy dad Milton moves from opium to heroin in the company of a drug-addicted lost-boy unofficial attaché of the British government (with the P.G. Wodehousean name of Quango Twistleton) while daughter Priscilla ventures over mean streets and minefields in search of the truth about Mom. This allows Kushner a number of cultural collisions, including an absurd yet moving encounter with an Afghan peddler who has a near-religious experience listening to Frank Sinatra on a borrowed Walkman. (Music, as we know, was verboten under the Taliban.) Poignantly, earnestly played at Trinity by Deep Katdare, the man sings along with strangely pertinent lyrics about " tickets to romantic places, " then collapses in tears. " Longing for Kabul, " he keens, " is killing me. "
Milton and Priscilla, too, are bereft — in part because the woman they’ve lost is not one they ever really possessed. Herself furious, the daughter is brought into the presence of an Afghan woman, a displaced librarian named Mahala, whose fury takes the form of a fierce anti-Taliban, anti-American rant that extends to wishing the birds of Kabul would break their necks flying against the windows of the house she cannot escape. " You love the Taliban so much? " she rages eerily. " Well, don’t worry, they’re coming to New York! "
Kushner’s writing is always vivid, and his concerns stretch well beyond the parlor, be it Ibsen’s or Donald Margulies’s. But toward the end of Homebody/Kabul the plot — particularly with regard to Mahala, who wants to use Milton and Priscilla as a ticket out of Afghanistan — becomes muddled. Like Mahala, the menacing Taliban mullah who controls her fate and that of the bereaved British " tourists " does a lot of angry pontificating. But why he wants to shoot the Afghan woman, and why he doesn’t, is unclear. None of this goes to the heart of the play, which is both a family passage and a bruising rite of global connection. But if there’s going to be a cloak-and-dagger aspect, the cloak needs to be cleaned and the dagger sharpened. And not even that would correct the major, unfixable flaw of this dense and fascinating work: the disappearance of its most fully human, original, and interesting character, the Homebody, a third of the way through.
Still, this is an important play by an exceptional dramatist, one chock with the history of a parched piece of the world we have manipulated and ignored at our peril. And the author, working with Eustis as dramaturg, is still refining it (a half-hour has been trimmed since the New York production). It’s worth remembering that Angels in America was in development for years before seeming to spring, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, into the glare of Broadway.
Certainly the Trinity production brings forth the theatrical strengths of the play, and the acting is good enough that the cartoon aspect of the Kabul-set portions is diminished. Both Donnie Keshawarz, as the mullah, and the diminutive yet formidable Yolande Bavan, as Mahala, give fiery performances as Taliban voice and Taliban victim. And Apollo Dukakis brings a whimsical charm to Priscilla’s self-appointed guide, a Tajik poet writing in the defunct " international language " of Esperanto.
There are fine performances, too, by the Trinity stalwarts, particularly Brian McEleney, whose Milton creeps from behind a stony mask to reveal a variety of hilarious, hideous, and humane faces, whether he’s giddy with heroin, snarling Western prejudice, or bonding with Mahala over the immutable verities of computer science and the Dewey Decimal System. As Priscilla, who seems to inherit her mother’s compulsion for words, Angela Brazil can be shrill, but she captures the character’s taut energy.
During the first act of Homebody/Kabul, the Homebody produces from a shopping bag the colorful Afghan hats that, along with the outdated guidebook, set her on her fateful journey. At Trinity, she ventures down off the stage and, as the house lights brighten, passes out these fez-like " millinerisms " to members of the audience. It’s a small gesture that breaks through the theatrical fourth wall in a conventional way. But it struck me that, at a time when so much of our theater seems insulated and small, Kushner is trying to break through the wall that separates the American stage not just from its spectators but from the wide world. It’s a worthy act of demolition.
