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A Dramatist’s Own Private Afghanistan

\"Homebody/Kabul\" is very much about people trying to erase their pasts through encounters with those who are different from them. Whether British or Afghan, Christian or Muslim, all the characters have a history created by colonialism that informs their present struggles.
[additional-authors]
September 25, 2003

"Homebody/Kabul," which opens at the Mark Taper Forum Oct. 2, is "a very dark, unhappy play in many ways," author Tony Kushner said. The Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of "Angels in America" began creating the piece in 1997, when his own obsession with Afghanistan conjoined with his interest in creating a monologue for a British friend. Over the years, the Dr. Seussian tour de force — at turns witty and endearing — accumulated two additional acts and 11 more characters, among other changes. But since the tragedies of Sept. 11, and as events change daily in our present military campaign, "Homebody/Kabul" often feels less like fiction and more like a dramatic interpretation of the day’s news. Rather than weakening the production, this unintended intermingling of fact and fiction heightens the show’s impact; when we leave the theater we have no choice but to carry it home. "I didn’t expect the outside world to be helping us out so much," Kushner said wryly, "providing a context of tragedy to this little tragedy we are making on the stage."

"Homebody/Kabul" is very much about people trying to erase their pasts through encounters with those who are different from them. Whether British or Afghan, Christian or Muslim, all the characters have a history created by colonialism that informs their present struggles. The British characters on stage are "overwhelmed and succumbing to luxury," masking their middle-class ennui with antidepressants, heroin and self-hate, while their Afghan foils suffer physical and emotional abuse created by extreme poverty and violence. The drama is fueled by the dynamic of oppression that still defines relationships between their two worlds: The guilty seek redemption from those they afflict, who in turn seek salvation from the very ones responsible for their suffering.

"Homebody/Kabul" opens in a sparse living room with the homebody of the title, played by Linda Emond, addressing us from a chair. It becomes clear through her act-long monologue that few expect much from her and that she has retreated into antidepressants, a predilection for little-known words and, of central importance to her life and this show, an armchair romance with Afghanistan. She is so enamored with the Afghanistan of old, and so pathetically wed to her chair, that she shares with the audience her passionate, desperate fantasy about getting swept away by a local Afghani hat merchant.

In the second and third acts, middle-class England is replaced by the broken-bricked ruins of Kabul, where we are told the homebody, who is never given any other name, has escaped her life of oppressive luxury. Is she alive? Is she dead? Those questions are left to her cowardly husband, Milton (Dylan Baker), and vitriolic daughter, Priscilla (Kelly Hutchinson), who become an unlikely pair of detectives, investigating hospitals and holy sites, biblical myths and family secrets, to discover what has torn their family apart. Along the way, they encounter a heady mix of characters, including a Tajik poet who works in Esperanto, a Taliban doctor whose English consists primarily of medical terms and a British aid worker addicted to local heroin. The more Milton and Priscilla learn, the less they actually know, as additional facts only call their earlier discoveries into question. In the end, "Homebody/Kabul" is less concerned about what actually occurred than with the condition of unknowing we are forced to confront when dialectical forces meet face to face.

This element of mystery and uncertainty, Kushner told the Forward during a 2001 interview, grew out of his initial inquiries into Afghanistan.

"The more I talked with people, the more deeply confused I became," he said.

Even research into how many Afghans were killed during President Bill Clinton’s bombing of Afghanistan in 1998 turned up wildly divergent answers, leading Kushner eventually to believe that some things are simply impossible to know. In addition, he said, his plays attempt to "probe areas of confusion and bewilderment," to engage the audience in a collective process of looking deeper into "a place of not knowing, of doubt."

All of the characters come from a background far different from the playwright’s Jewish American gay identity.

"I checked my identities at the door," he said, "but I knew that a Jew writing about Islam would be interesting, complicated."

Kushner had no trouble drawing on his background as a Jew to depict the Taliban, using Orthodox Jews as his model.

"I think there is absolutely no difference between deeply religious people of one faith and deeply religious people of another faith," he said, pausing a moment. He then cited the common heritage of an Abrahamic tradition and argued that "among extremely religious Jews, God is in everything and everything is about one’s relationship to God."

And yet there are differences, he said upon reflection. While the concept of becoming a martyr in the Jewish world is seen as tragic, he said, in the Christian and Muslim world suffering is seen as "being a good in and of itself, of having some sort of spiritual valence." And in Christianity, of course, martyrdom is viewed as "transformative, transfigurative. It’s the resurrection."

Kushner said he developed the play’s British family as Jews during the early stages. However, "British Jews are too complicated," he soon decided, and after a brief stint as Catholics they once again returned to the Church of England.

In the end, he was glad he made the homebody the way he did because she "has a sense of engagement with the world that it is completely Christian; it’s about suffering. It’s the idea of expressing your agency in the world by taking on the suffering of the world."

Kushner once wrote, "I am in the habit of hoping," and in "Homebody/ Kabul," hope emerges through the metaphor of language.

Among the many quirky details that fill this play, one of the oddest is its use of Esperanto, the international language developed by the Polish Jewish philologist Ludwik Zamenhof in 1887 to ease communication between speakers of different tongues. The word "esperanto" itself means "hopeful." The play also concerns itself with binary code, the language uniting all computers, and the Dewey Decimal System, which gives books a clear place in the universe of knowledge. These global languages represent the hopeful side of our interconnected world. Globalization corrupts all it touches and none can escape its reach, the show tells us, but it also brings people together and creates order out of chaos. The tragedy of the Taliban is that they represent what happens when order is realized at the cost of freedom and justice, but "Homebody/Kabul" holds out hope that all three are possible. Most important, the show is less interested in offering a solution than in taking its audience on a journey to explore how fascist ideologies come into fashion in the first place, whether in Nazi Germany, Afghanistan or here in America.

"Homebody/Kabul" plays Oct. 2-Nov. 9, at the Mark Taper Forum at the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. For tickets, call (213) 628-2772.

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