Alternate Title Homebody / Kabul
Premiere New York Premiere
Production Language English
Country of Origin United States
Description It’s said that timing is everything. It certainly holds true for Tony Kushner’s uncannily prescient Homebody/Kabul, completed just prior to September 11, 2001. As with his momentous Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, Kushner has created a work at once hypnotic, intensely personal, emotionally and stylistically expansive, politically astute, and wildly inventive.
Set in 1998, the play revolves around the possibly horrific ramifications of a solitary British housewife’s infatuation with Afghanistan. Her source of inspiration: an out-of-date travel guide. It’s from her introspective and highly articulate musings that Kushner launches his epic.
True to his propensity for reworking, Kushner has retooled his original text (“the changes have to do with psychological dynamics between the characters, not with Afghan politics” says the playwright). This latest rendition, developed at two of America’s most renowned theater companies, Steppenwolf in Chicago and Los Angeles’ Center Theatre Group / Mark Taper Forum—under the stage direction of Tony Award-winner Frank Galati (The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime)-emphasizes the play’s engrossing plot.
Central to the action is a dysfunctional family of the first order. Each member, from the Homebody (the housewife)-a titanic role magnificently realized by Linda Emond, returning to the character she portrayed in the 2001 New York Theatre Workshop staging—to her distant, scientist husband (a cool Reed Birney) to their affection-starved daughter (indie film actor Maggie Gyllenhaal in her New York stage debut), is seen at his or her worst—or most revealed—when the action shifts to conflict-ravaged Kabul, where the Homebody, who’s ventured there on her own, disappears.
It is a deeply humane work, and one that is more relevant than ever, insisting, through the characters who inhabit the beautifully realized narrative, that we turn the lens on ourselves and grapple with our own, often myopic expectations and perceptions.
Identifier 2004s.00783
