Homebody/Kabul (review)

Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul was the winner of the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner award for best play of 2001. Kushner began writing Homebody/Kabul about three years before "Taliban," "Northern Alliance," "burqa," and "Afghanistan" became the lingua franca of denizens of the United States. Indelibly linked now with the events of
9/11/01, Kushner's play has been widely declared "eerily prescient." To his credit, Kushner dismisses this hype: "I'm not psychic. If you choose to write about current events there's a good chance you will find the events you've written about to be . . . well, current" (Homebody/Kabul. TCG 2002: 146). Kushner recognizes that plays must have something to say that exceeds the pressing tension of the present tense. I had the opportunity to see Kushner's play twice on opposite coasts in the space of eight months and this experience confirmed, once more, how accelerated the present tense is in an era of postmodernism.

In the New York Theatre Workshop production, directed by Declan Donnellan, the sheer length of the play—it was over four hours on opening night—led to a certain frustrated impatience on the audience's part. Even more dismaying was the fall in quality between the mesmerizing Homebody and the meandering plot of Kabul. In the production at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Kabul had been cut substantially, and Tony Taccone's direction was more aggressive and faster paced than Donnellan's. Moreover, in the eight months between the opening of the play and its Berkeley run, the situation in Kabul had been radically altered, making the political urgency of some of Kushner's comments about the Taliban's hold on the city seem already dated, rather than "eerily prescient." Finally, the psychological terrain between downtown New York twelve weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center and Berkeley forty weeks later was also dramatically different. In New York, the play was seen primarily in terms of the attack on the city—there's a line in the play about the Taliban coming to New York—while in Berkeley, the reception of the play concerned Kushner's love affair with language.

The first hour and ten minutes of the play, the Homebody monologue, demonstrates Kushner's considerable gifts: his writing is fluent, evocative, and emotionally and intellectually expansive. Joining the aesthetics of theatrical minimalism—a woman sitting on a chair for seventy minutes talking—with language of such baroque intensity that the slightest physical gesture seems unbearably distracting, the monolgue is completely captivating. The Homebody, an English woman who has an unhappy marriage, takes anti-depressants, worries about her daughter, "for whom alas nothing seems to go well," and reads and speaks obsessively. She begins the monologue quoting from Nancy Hatch Dupree's tour guide, An Historical Guide to Kabul, published in 1965 and thus completely out of date: "Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 BC. . . ." This sense of historical time-lag is crucial to Kushner's political polemic. To understand anything about the rise of the Taliban, Kushner insists, one needs to think through the extraordinarily brutal history of Afghanistan. The monologue places Kabul, a city now so newly near for US audiences, in a vast historical setting that continually displaces and defers the possibility of dramatic or political resolution. The sometimes maddeningly long sentences of the Homebody bespeak the difficulty of finding a way to reach closure about Kabul.

In New York, Linda Edmond was brilliant as Homebody. She performed the long monologue with verve and wit, and more impressively, she conveyed a profound sadness and despair about her loneliness even in—perhaps especially in—her most comic moments. In Berkeley, Michelle Moran emphasized the Homebody's frailty in physical terms. She had a cane placed in front of her chair, and when she moved at all, it seemed to require all of her attention. This...