In the shattered world
of post-9/11, Tony Kushner may have found his time. Kushner has long embraced the often
scorned label of "political playwright," always searching in the work of others
and in his own work for the socio-political armature that girds character and theme. In
his A Bright Room Called Day, he charts German social democratic
impotence at the rise to power of Nazism; in Slavs,
he evokes the death of the Soviet Union in a corrosive, mordantly comic tale of chaos and
corruption; and in his most acclaimed work, the two-part, nine-hour epic Angels
in America, he presents a "gay fantasia on national themes" that places
personal suffering and betrayal in the larger worlds of disease, homophobia, and
reactionary politics.
How different from most of the new dramatic work by Kushner's
contemporaries! In the past few months New York's Off-Broadway theatres have presented
several excellent plays which deserve more attention than they have so far received. New
plays such as Psych by Evan Smith, [sic]
by Melissa James Gibson, and The Shape of
Things by Neil LaBute focus on personal alliances and betrayals, on the angst of
the interpersonal. They may suggest social criticism, but these critiques are muted and
oblique.
Kushner, on the other hand, always foregrounds politics and history. He
has found a unique dramatic voice in his enduring need for political action despite the
loss of ideological faith. As the old Bolshevik, Aleksii Antedilluvianovitch
Prelapsarianov, states at the beginning of Perestroika(part two of Angels in America): "The Great Question before us is: Will
the Past release us?" Release us to what? To the possibility of Change both personal
and political, even if it is now apparent that real social change must be re-clothed in a
new "beautiful theory" to replace the shed, dead skin of socialism. Like Osama
Bin Laden, this new beautiful theory has as yet not been found, despite announced
sightings. Kushner, however, will keep looking, and these questions undergird his
impressive, if at times, ungainly new play Homebody/Kabul--at nearly four hours
running time, his most ambitious work since the Angels epic.
The play has become a news item because its composition predates 9/11.
Much of Kushner's long fascination with Afghanistan and its neighbors resides in their
remoteness despite geographic centrality; forbidding visual splendor is a natural theatre
for places whose exotic names evoke the metaphoric power of the unknown: Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Peshwar, Kabul, Jalamabad--before the Towers fell these names
resonated for westerners with mellifluous mystery.
Now we nod with CNN knowledgability as we admire Kushner's prescience
and historical foresight. The play is in three long acts, the first a discursive monologue
set in London just before the American bombing of suspected terrorist training camps in
1998, the last two essentially an adventure narrative set in the real city of Kabul not
too long thereafter. The play was generated from what is now its first act. The British
actress Kiki Markham asked Kushner to provide her with a monologue which she performed
with critical success in London in 1999. The monologue is a brilliant tour de force by a
middle-aged British matron who reticently offers glimpses of the pain of a loveless
marriage as she conjures a dream vision of an ancient land and culture--a place of
"strangeness and beauty"--which from the "dawn of history" has
transcended its victimization. This information she has gleaned from an old guidebook
which she has before her and from which she occasionally reads.
Alone on stage, the eponymous "Homebody" segues into personal
anecdote (mostly about encountering a disfigured Afghan shopkeeper who elicited an
impulsive purchase of native hats) and cosmic ruminations about the paradoxes of love and
lovelessness, mystery and familiarity, isolation and interconnection, permanence and
corruption. Plotless, beyond realism, this elegant stream-of-consciousness is an hour of
Beckettian brilliance.
Kushner can't go on; he goes on. The last two acts create not only a
plot, but a complicated one at that. It seems that the Homebody indeed decided to leave
home to visit the seat of her deepest fantasies. But once in Kabul she disappears. What
happened to her is the mystery her husband, an uncommunicative communications expert, and
her daughter, a neurotic, alienated young woman, strive to discover. The official Taliban
report is that the Homebody was horribly killed by a mob offended by her apparent flouting
of Muslim female propriety. But since her supposedly mutilated body has also disappeared,
her family does not believe it. Soon, another explanation is offered by a native source:
She has taken the veil and married a Muslim doctor, and her family is urged to take the
doctor's rejected wife as a kind of exchange. A late act of Taliban mercy toward this
woman seems, in light of what we have discovered about that vile, misogynistic bunch,
exceedingly unlikely.
Kushner, of course, layers this busy narrative with often fascinating
historical fragments and observations on western and Afghan culture (there is dialogue in
French, German, Esperanto, Pashto--the language of the Pashtuns--and Dari--the Afghan
version of Farsi.) There are individual scenes of undeniable power--particularly the
rejected Afghan wife's rage at the West's complicity in bringing the Taliban to power
which contains the eerily predictive lines (written before 9/11): "We must
suffer under the Taliban so that the U.S. might settle a 20-year score with Iran!...Don't
worry, they're coming to New York!" Still, in the last acts, the plot moves the
characters rather than the reverse, and the new major characters, the Homebody's husband
and daughter, are nowhere as fascinating as the woman revealed in the first act.
Some of this invidious contrast lies in the acting in this production.
Although not British, Linda Emond is thoroughly convincing in her mystical matronly role.
She impressively commands the audience by the conveyed intensity of her obsession. There
is a mystery we strive to penetrate in this repressed but irrepressible woman. But the
actors who play her family have but a modicum of her complexity; and they never are
convincingly British. This is particularly true of the performance of Kelly Hutchinson as
the daughter, Priscilla. It is not just a question of vowels; Ms. Hutchinsin is so
American in the naked emotionalism of her reactions. (What might a brilliant young British
actress like, say, Jennifer Ehle make of this part?) The minor characters fare much
better, with excellent performances by Rita Wolf as the rejected wife, Bill Camp as a
Graham Greenish heroin-addicted expatriate, and Yusef Bulos as a Tajik guide who writes
poetry in Esperanto.
The current Off-Broadway production is directed with customary skill by
the innovative British director Declan Donnelan who directed the successful version of Angels
in America at the Royal National Theatre in London. One of the co-founders of the
theatre group Cheek By Jowl, which specializes in renovative, stripped-down versions of
classic plays, Donnelan here displays his familiar minimalist esthetic of deemphasizing
the spectacular: a table and chair on a bare stage define the first act. The Afghanistan
scenes are played against designer Nick Ormerod's ingeniously clever but simple
arrangement of jagged brick walls. The artistic problems here reside not with the director
but with the playwright's inability to tame his volatile material, and with some key
problems with casting. Still, the faults pale: what other American--indeed,
world--playwright could offer so ambitious, so all-encompassing a work on this scale, a
work which moves so effortlessly between the personal and the political? Given our altered
radar screens, we can surmise that next season's new plays will not be so unconcerned with
the geopolitical, and that Tony Kushner will no longer be a voice in the wilderness.
