Toward the end of “Homebody/Kabul,” Tony
Kushner’s sensational new play at the Mark Taper Forum,
Milton Ceiling (Reed Birney) tries to explain binary duals to an
Afghan woman he’s considering taking back to London. She
doesn’t understand much English, but he speaks with
Kushner’s poetic grace nonetheless. When describing binary
code, the example he uses is, “Nothing one. One
nothing.”
Nothing could sum up the point of “Homebody/Kabul”
better, if it’s possible to sum up the play in a sentence.
Kushner’s lengthy tale (the three acts total well over three
hours) constantly brings out the futility of the West’s
involvement in Afghanistan and the surrounding region: Nothing has
been won, and we’ve won nothing. Kushner wrote the play
before Sept. 11, 2001, but since then the point may be even more
true.
Kushner’s political background is embodied by Ceiling and
his daughter Priscilla (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a pair of British
visitors in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, just after the
American bombardment of suspected terrorist training camps in
nearby Khost, Afghanistan, in August 1998. The two are in
Afghanistan to try to find Milton’s wife and
Priscilla’s mother (Linda Emond in an astonishing
performance), who goes to Kabul on a whim for reasons not fully
explained by her 53-minute monologue that opens the play. But
that’s hardly the point.
Kushner’s Afghanistan is the one you would expect to see
from the playwright of “Angels in America.” At once sad
and upsetting, it soon becomes angry and frightening, only to again
transform into something else. Kabul is a city defined by its
attackers. The play starts with the line: “(the) story begins
at the very dawn of history,” in accordance with the
country’s tumultuous past: It has been attacked numerous
times.
That constant and immediate sense of history is ironic: The West
tears down its own history and forgets it, but when it tears down
the history of others, the absence lingers. Kabul has a past, but
no present, and not until they arrive in Afghanistan can Milton and
Priscilla confront their own forgotten family demons.
Simultaneously, they must also confront the city. In the second
act, the wall that separates their hotel from the streets of Kabul
disappears. Milton and Priscilla open up, but only for a moment. By
the time act three starts, the wall is back.
In a way, “Homebody/Kabul” is the same old Kushner
brilliance, in that the writing and political mind-set could only
come from this particular playwright. That’s not to imply
that if you’ve seen one Kushner play, you’ve seen them
all. Rather, it’s to suggest that the ease of recognition of
Kushner’s work speaks to his talent not as a pigeon-holed
political playwright, but as one of the premiere American writers
of our time.