Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Eastward ho!
BTW aces Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul
BY IRIS FANGER

The first time I saw Tony Kushner’s sprawling Homebody/Kabul, I was struck by the prescience of its depiction of a Western woman’s doomed infatuation with Afghanistan, a country she knew only from outdated guidebooks. Kushner had had his hand on the pulse of our nation earlier in his Pulitzer-winning two-part drama Angels in America, which revealed through vivid prose and fearful oracles the effect of AIDS on our society. Here he’d done it again: Homebody/Kabul was written before the events of September 11 branded the politics of the Middle East in general, and Afghanistan in particular, onto our consciousness.

At its New York premiere in the fall of 2001, Kushner’s play was eloquent and disturbing in equal measure, filled with imaginative complexity of language but attempting to cover too much ground in its multiple, messy plot lines and wide-ranging geography. Since then, the playwright has reworked the drama, compressing it into a three-hour chronicle that maintains its passionate voices while tightening the action. He has even managed to integrate the themes of the first act — a long monologue by the Homebody, as the retiring British matron at the play’s center is called — more securely. The reworked text offers the kind of heightened, pertinent questioning that’s found in the work of few other contemporary American playwrights. Kushner explores nothing less than the profound spiritual disconnect between East and West, as embodied in the conflict between the teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition and the aspirations of Islam. The dialogue is sprinkled with references to the more than 30 languages of Afghanistan — a metaphor for the impossible task of even deciphering the desires of the people, never mind understanding them.

Kushner is a poet and a philosopher, but he’s also a skilled craftsman. Like his other works, Homebody/Kabul deals with a family in recognizable conflict, only on a larger scale. The Homebody is a middle-aged British woman locked in a drab, unhappy marriage who speaks in oblique fashion directly to the audience. She offers her tumbled thoughts as if the audience were sitting at her kitchen table and sharing a pot of tea. Her rambling monologue is punctuated by passages from the guidebook on Afghanistan that she’s picked up in a second-hand-book shop. When she takes off for Kabul, never to be seen again, husband Milton and daughter Priscilla go after her. The play is stuffed with surprises, twists of the multiple plot strands, and Kushner’s juxtaposition of Frank Sinatra songs with the lofty dreams of the characters is just one example of his ability to mingle the familiar with the cosmic.

Under artistic director Jason Southerland, the Boston Theatre Works production of Homebody/Kabul at the Boston Center for the Arts does justice to Kushner’s ideas but also digs deeply into his characters, particularly in its poignant disclosure of the destructive nature of their relationships. The crackerjack ensemble, portraying natives of both England and Afghanistan, is led by Nancy Carroll as the Homebody and Helen McElwain in a revelatory performance as Priscilla, the daughter the Homebody has wounded. John Sarrouf, in the role of a Tajik Afghan poet, details the opaque contradictions of a personality that understands but nonetheless must exploit Western bewilderment at this most foreign of lands. And set designer Zeynep Bakkal has devised an ingenious way of transforming the black-box BCA Plaza Theatre into both the English kitchen of the Homebody and the rocky landscape of Kabul. The intimacy of that black box emphasizes the effect of Carroll’s virtuoso performance, which is fraught with mercurial changes of thought, and the heartbreaking transformation of McElwain’s troubled daughter.

If we are to believe Kushner, there’s little hope of the West’s coming out on top in this struggle. Meanwhile, as is so often the case, the poets and the artists are ahead of the rest of us when it comes to comprehending the human condition.


Issue Date: March 4 - 10, 2005
Back to the Theater table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group