Homebody/Kabul
A couple of more paragraphs on Kushner.
SF Weekly
April 2002
Homebody/Kabul is better than Angels in America. Exaggeration? Well, no. I didn’t like Angels in America. But after eight years of wishy-washy work Tony Kushner is now back in form with an ambitious, overlong political drama on a topic so timely it seems almost offensive. It’s about Afghanistan. It shocked Manhattan audiences last December with a line about the Taliban “coming to New York” that sounded either like evil prophecy or plain treason. The play is not, as the Wall Street Journal harrumphed, something that “might as well have been created by a Taliban playwright,” but it also isn’t the best American play in the last ten years, as the giddier critics in New York have pretended. The play’s anti-Western politics should be familiar to anyone who’s ever been to college. After September 11 that tone just seemed a little … off. There was even a tense moment last year when the National Endowment for the Arts shelved a grant for the Berkeley Rep to stage it.
Was it worth so much controversy? Probably not. I think H/K would have caused a little stir and then faded into the night if Muslim fundamentalism hadn’t made itself so relevant last year. Kushner has good timing. He wrote the first part, Homebody, in 1998, as a seventy-five minute monologue; it’s a sprawling speech that shows a British woman sitting in a comfy chair and traveling (in books, memory, and imagination) to Afghanistan, to distant nebulae, to a hat shop in London, and back in time to the conquests of Alexander and Tamerlane. Later, Kushner added Kabul, a three-act detective story set in motion when the same woman travels (by plane) to Kabul, and disappears. Both parts were finished before September 11, and the only American president Kushner had in mind to criticize was Bill Clinton, for firing a missile at Khost.
Michelle Morain plays the Homebody, who unfortunately has no name of her own. She sits, in a cardigan, next to a small table with a lamp. Reading now and then from a Kabul guidebook, she tells us about an Afghan merchant in London who sold her “party hats” — colorful, glass-beaded pillboxes, pacoolis — and whose mutilated fingers inspire a reverie about Afghanistan’s violent past. The speech is a tour-de-force, lyrical and beautifully timed. Morain performs it with an earnest intensity that overshadows the rest of the play. It needs editing, of course — when Kushner’s polemic voice rises to the surface you have the idea that she’s just reading one of his pieces from The Nation. But it isn’t Morain’s fault that someone should have given her less to say.
When she finishes, the scrim behind her dissolves to show a bombed-out slum of Kabul. Kate Edmunds’ set design and Peter Maradudin’s lights make this transformation graceful and dramatic. After so much babble about Afghanistan, war, and the Taliban, now we’re suddenly there, without an intermission, in the capital of what was, recently, an enemy nation—and the critic’s heart skips a beat, because you don’t get to see current world politics dramatized in such full color very often on the stage. We learn that the Homebody has been mutilated by a mob of fundamentalists after walking through Kabul without her burqa. (She was also listening to Sinatra on a Walkman.) We listen to a doctor describe the state of her body to her husband, Milton, and her fucked-up daughter, Priscilla, who has to wait behind a curtain until the doctor leaves.
Heidi Dippold plays Priscilla, awkwardly, as a sassy blonde Londoner in jeans and a navel-baring top. She insists to her uptight fater that she has to go searching through the streets of Kabul, right now, for her mom. She’s reckless enough to remove the burqa and light a cigarette in public, which nearly gets her killed by a long-bearded Talib; but she manages to hear a rumor on the streets that her mother isn’t dead, only converted to Islam, and married to a Muslim man. Then it gets strange: The same man’s Afghan wife would also like to leave her marriage and go home with Priscilla to London. This flimsy contraption of a plot fuels a desperate search for the Homebody.
Kushner, in other words, pulls an important punch: His drama doesn’t live up to the sweeping promise of the first act. He relies on a detective-novel plot to steer his characters to a symmetrical ending and a banal conclusion about East and West. It’s not that the play is uninteresting, or unengaging. Kushner’s details about Tajiks, Pashtuns, and American support of the Taliban (to fight opium, to build a pipeline) are well-researched. Charles Shaw Robinson also plays a vividly uptight Milton; Hector Correa is a convincing Talib; and Harsh Nayyar does beautiful work as Priscilla’s polite and charming Tajik guide, who also writes Esperanto poetry. The trouble is that the play feels hollow at the core. Around hour three you realize that Priscilla’s quest is a sham, and that Priscilla, in particular, is just a jumble of traits that Kushner finds convenient. Between her scrappy London rudeness and her tendency to use bookwormish words (inherited wholesale from her mum), Dippold struggles to find a coherent character.
Kushner wants to fuse George Bernard Shaw’s epic-polemical style with the personal drama of Williams or Chekhov, but the experiment falls apart, like Angels, because his characters are so thin. (By Angels I mean both parts, by the way — including Perestroika.) He still hasn’t found a way to fuse his politics onto real people without distorting the people. Which is not to say I wish he’d stop trying. This play, at least, doesn’t Mormon-bash. That’s a sign of growth since Angels. Last week on the radio Kushner admitted to drag-queen envy — to feeling like a nerd when he’d rather be fabulous — and the same tension exists in Homebody/Kabul: He wants to make up for a wonkish pedanticism by spinning a fabulous, world-consuming epic. Sometimes, in fits, he succeeds.
Michael Scott Moore
