Customer Reviews

Homebody/Kabul

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been a huge Tony Kushner fan ever since i read and subsequently performed in Angels in America my first and second years of college. I bought Homebody/Kabul as soon as it came out in paperback, and was fortunate enough to see it performed at the Intiman Theater in Seattle recently. After reading and seeing this play, my love for Kushner and his work has only deepened.
At this point, to call Kushner a master of language is to belabor the point. He capable of provoking any reaction under the sun, from hilarity to pathos to utter despair, with a simple, poetic phrase one moment, then a completely different reaction the next. I also won't waste time your time with my interpretation of the "message" of the play, though it certainly has many messages. The first act of Homebody/Kabul consist of one character (the Homebody) sitting in a chair recounting a selective history of Afghanistan mixed in with stories from her life, for an entire hour! Now, read on the page this can get tedious at times, though the stories are interesting. But Ellen McLaughlin, the masterful actor who performed the role in Seattle, sat on stage in one place for that whole hour and commanded the entire attention of the audience. It was mind-boggling, awe-inspiring, transporting, and reminded me forcibly of the difference between reading and performance. McLaughlin took the, admittedly brilliantly constructed, words on the page and turned them into something vital, poetic, and magical.
The rest of the play deals with the aftermath of the Homebody's decision to go to Kabul and disappear. Her husband Milton and her daughter Priscilla, hearing she has been killed, go to Kabul to recover her body. Soon evidence turns up that she may have taken the veil and married a Muslim man. But she is never actually seen again, leaving the other characters to come to their own conclusions and deal with her disappearance as best they can. Along the way we are treated to hilariously funny moments, such as Priscilla almost setting her burqua on fire with a cigarrette and Milton trying opium and heroin with junkie NGO employee Quango Twistleton, and heartbreaking ones such as an Afghan woman's multilingual rant about the state of her country and a man moved to tears by a Frank Sinatra song.
As a whole the play is certainly not perfect, it is sometimes unwieldy and some scenes seem under developed. But for me this is more than made up for by its scope, ambition, and searching intelligence. This is not Tony Kushner telling us what to think, he is presenting us with historical information filtered through the eyes of some deeply flawed but fascinating and ultimately human characters. In the end, he does not lay blame for the miserable state of Afghanistan on this or that country or faction, but shows how eveyone is responsible and no one wants to take the responsibility of really making it right. See it performed if you can, but if you can't, read the script, mull it over, and come to your own conclusions.

I was fortunate enough to see this performed in New York last year. This play unleashes great torrents of language and ideas at every turn and is the theatrical equivalent of a clusterbomb. Yet, with time to read and mull, it becomes something quite different.

Years of work and research are hung on the frame of a simple melodrama about a father and daughter searching in a strange country for a wife and mother. Kushner's mythical Afghanistan is a place where the tower of Babel toppled and people speak everything from Russian to Esperanto. The hapless British thrust into this burka'd world will never grasp that we in the west have "succumbed to luxury" -- though perhaps the audience will.

Some other reviewers found the Homebody's monologue dull on the page. I assure you it is quite stirring in performance. The same may be said of much of the play which, like Angels in America, is unwieldy but brilliant. Kushner has admitted in interviews that the play should be trimmed but I think, when reading the play, the overambitiousness is a plus. Kushner is a playwright with a social consciousness, but also a literary and poetic conscientiousness. The use of 'sunny' as an adjective recalls Sunni and the etymology of Quango's name is a play unto itself.

This play is 'about' too many things to effectively say what it is about. I appreciate it as a feast of language and a virtuoso display of Kushner's talent. While it may run long and fail to cohere thematically, it is shorter and more thematically coherent than Angels. What is a clusterbomb in the theater is chocolate cake when iced with covers.

Tony Kushner, who with "Angels in America" arguably gave us the two greatest works of American drama since "Death of a Salesman," continues his drive to create a grand theatrical voice with "Homebody/Kabul."

And though he falls far short in his attempt, it feels a little crass to fault him for it. This play should be appreciated for its ambition and for the unabashed joy Kushner shows for the intricacy and the density of the English language. His work is great to read even when it ultimately misses the mark.

Although some readers may be disappointed the Tony Kushner's latest play is not at all similar to his first great play, ANGELS IN AMERICA, it is one of the best plays of the decade. Kushner begins with a character who is drawn to travel to Afghanistan where she disappears. Her husband and grown daughter arrive in Kabul under the Taliban to find their wife/mother. They never do find her, but instead are exposed to life in Afghanistan under the Taliban -- a country retaining aspects of its great history, but living in a present of oppression and fear. Through this, Kushner explores the West's culpability in the tragedy of Afghanistan, the ability of the human spirit to survive under the worst possible circumstances, and the need on both sides to truly experience and understand the other. The play is filled with Kushner's trademark style -- a Brechtian, cinematic structure -- and lyrical flights of language, rich characterizations, and fascinating, disturbing ideas about a part of the world few Americans understood or knew much about prior to the tragedies of September 11. Now, more than ever, this play raises some of the most important questions of our time.

Like Angels in America, Kushner juxtaposes two seemingly different people and their respective societies, only to show how similar they really are. What are more absurd, Kushner seems to ask, some of the obvious horrors of life in Afghanistan, or some of the subtle opiates that constitute life in the Western world? Neither society appears to be fulfilling in the long run, though a change of scenery seems to be the tonic. Kushner describes a world in which the insanity of one world appears to be the cure for the insanity caused by the other.

This play is certainl though-provoking, and not easily forgotten. I'd love to see it in the theater.

Some people believe in reincarnation. I don't but for those who do, here is some evidence to support your case/cause. Kushner can write a pretty line, but here we have further evidence that we have a talented writer in search of a genre. Why America produces playwrights with the desire to tell the story of mankind is hard to explain. Russians don't, so sprawl alone cannot be the answer. There's O'Neill, Rice, the mature Williams, Miller: they all used the stage to explain the universe. On occasion they wrote a decent play. Kushner's writing is so good that critics overlook the fact that he can't write a play. Four hour epics don't cut it. This play opens with an arresting monologue which, as delivered in New York, was fascinating and well-worth the price of admission. The so-called play that takes up the rest of the evening is disappointing to say the least. Like Elmer Rice, there is a lively mind at work here, with huge theatrical ambitions, trying to write down everything that pops into his head. The result is a mediocre little drip into the sand of time.

Having written one of the great plays of contemporary American theatre, surely Kushner feels that his last piece was a tough act to follow. So what does he do? He tries to write something that will have a quieter opening than the last one. But, suddenly with the events of september 11 one of the most talented playwrights in the country is opening a play set largely in Afghanistan and discussing the troubles between the west (particularly America and England) and its conflicts with Aghanistan and Islam.

The play contains some brilliant poetic images and chilling moments, but the trouble is a play that runs nearly four hours when performed, these moments do not stretch out the entire piece. A British woman seeks the grave of Cain only to disappear completely, an Muslim woman goes mad in passion for her country and makes a eery prophetic statement that the Taliban is coming to New York, and another man tries to persuade a western girl the beauties of an invented language with no history of oppression. There is a goldmine of valuable ideas in this work and it would be foolish to pass it by.

The difficulty is that the play largely limps to a start with a very long rambling monologue with interesting ideas about a homebody desiring escape in her vision of Afghanistan a nearly orientalist construct. With four hours of material here, while the afghanistan scenes clip along at a steady and intense pace one has to wonder why the play wasn't cut down. Certainly a few edits here and there wouldn't have hurt.

While this is not perfection nor genius, there is some good material here and Kushner's work deserves the readers it gets.

Homebody's extended thought streams and speeches were wonderful. I would like to meet her, assuming she is not dead of course. This is the first play I have read by Tony Kushner and I have never been lucky enough to see any of his plays performed. I think he is a fascinating writer. I laughed, I learned, I was outraged, I nodded my head in agreement.

Tony Kushner was quoted and an excerpt was read from "Homebody/Kabul" at a local Not in Our Name event. His words and work resonate with the time.

Since I wrote the above review, I saw the play last night. It is even more powerful on stage. In the long Homebody monologue, it felt like the audience wanted to support Homebody, she seemed vulnerable alone on the stage for so long. Her comments made the audience laugh, nod in agreement, and feel her sadness.

The tone changed in the second half of the play and the audience seemed wrung out at the end with all the emotions and ideas to ponder. Whether read or watched, this play is exceedingly powerful. I highly recommend both.

I had to read it for a class. It was O.K. At times it grabbed my interest more than I thought it would. It just wasn't the type of literature that I really enjoy and I found the writing hard to follow sometimes in the first act -- it was an intentional choice by the author to make a point, but still hard to follow. Perhaps if I had heard it spoken, since this is a play, it would have made more sense. While it did have many underlying themes I prefer something a little less pendantic.

Also, it was written before 9/11 so the author chose to write a long afterward about remarks in the play about how the Taliban would be coming to the U.S. She wrote what she wrote. I didn't think she needed to write an explanation/politically correct apology.

Can you imagine a play that is awesome? I can, because I saw it last month at the Hillsboro community center for Arts Performance. It was Tony Kushners (no relation to Ashton : )) play called Homebody Kabul. What is good about it? The timeliness, and also how it relates to our situation in the Middle East and in Afghanistan and in Pakistan also right now. Of course, after I saw the play I immediately bought the book and then read the play in the book, and I was not disappointed--its Kushner's dramatic explication of important ideas that really made the characters "leap" off the page and into my imagination, not to mention how it made me think. I recommend this book to the socially-minded literati of today's generation X youth. Good? Yes it is. Also check out his other play, Angles in America.