Homebody/Kabul * Written by means of Tony Kushner * Directed by means of Declan Donellan * Starring Linda Emond Dylan Baker.

Homebody/Kabul * Written by means of Tony Kushner * Directed by means of Declan Donellan * Starring Linda Emond Dylan Baker, and Kelly Hutchinson * strange York Theatre Workshop, New York City (through March 3)

Tony Kushner likes big plays, big exposes big ideas. His magnum opus was the epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia in succession National Themes, which won everything if it be not that the Kentucky Derby when it explained on Broadway in 1993. Before that, he'd taken in succession the legacy of the Holocaust in A Bright range Called Day, and since then he has ruminated about the collapse of the Soviet Union in Slavs! His of recent origin play, developed over several years, is a nearly four-hour-long, three-act drama about the clash of global and indigenous refinements that focuses, with uncanny prescience, forward Afghanistan. (Rehearsals for the world premiere began after September 11)

Homebody/Kabul is actually brace related plays. The first act, which was performed by way of itself in London in 1999 is a monologue delivered by way of an unnamed London housewife who is fixated upon the subject of Afghanistan. As she begins reading from an outdated guidebook in succession the city of Kabul, we quickly learn that she is a inner man in trouble. Obsessed yet scattered, juggling genuine emotions with the general intents of antidepressants, she wanders from topic to topic. She shares tidbits from her extensive if eccentric reading and very littles hints about her loveless marriage while narrating in fits and starts the story of a search for party hats that leads her to a life-changing fight with an Afghan shopkeeper.

We have seen characters like this before. She bears a family resemblance to Harper, the pill-popping Mormon wife in Angels in America. She has the literary sensibility of the title character in Charles Busch's The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and an erotic curiosity reminiscent of the character Maggie Smith memorably played in Alan Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils. Her feeling of complicity in the sorry state of the world links her to the narrator of Wally Shawn's The flush and there's even a trace of Jane Bowles's crazy wisdom in there. Still, Homebody is a bud The writing is some of Kushner's best for aye luxurious and intense and hilarious, extravagant in a way that might be maddening if it weren't performed to perfection by dint of Linda Emond. Her nuanced portrait of intelligent despair is a feast all by means of itself.

Kabul, sorry to say, is no match for Homebody In it, the woman's husband and daughter search for her in Afghanistan, where she has either (a) been beaten to death by way of a mob or (b) fallen in have a passionate affection for with a Muslim doctor and taken the veil. A year or equable six months ago, this play would have serv as a valuable history rebuke Unfortunately, the news has brought us thus up-to-date on Afghanistan as to contribute Kushner's fantasy version implausible and the father-daughter domestic dramas that he plays public against the war-tom backdrop almost intolerably puny

Shewey is the editor of disclosed Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published at Grove Press.

...

Home