SOURCE: Reston, James, Jr. “A Prophet in His Time.” American Theatre 19, no. 3 (March 2002): 28-30, 50-3.

[In the following review, Reston offers praise for Homebody/Kabul, calling it a brilliant play and a major accomplishment.]

Early in the second act of Homebody/Kabul Tony Kushner's brilliant play about Afghanistan, I gave up on my quest for a purely artistic evening. Foolishly, I had tried to imagine what this theatrical experience might have been if Sept. 11 had never happened; if America had not gone to Afghanistan—in truth and in its mind—through the fall of 2001; if I personally had not been so transfixed and paralyzed and fascinated by the faraway events, so that nothing else from September to January had seemed so important as to read every story about “the war,” every profile about the innocent, vaporized victims, every new attempt to explain the mind of Osama bin Laden and the wrath of Islamic radicals against the West.

But it was no use. The connection of this play to the Recent Past (to borrow one of its early lines), was too intense, too immediate. Neither Kushner nor his audience could escape reality. There was no way to move back into the mind-set of just another evening out at the theatre. Much more than mere art was in play here.

“The Present is always an awful place to be,” the loquacious British woman of a certain age known as the Homebody says at the play's beginning. And so it was: In early January, as Homebody/Kabul had just opened, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar were still at large. The flag-draped caskets of the first American casualties of war were coming home. The warlords and the thieves had taken over again, and the poppy fields were back in business, foreshadowing a flood of cheap Afghan heroin on the American streets next year. The calls for more American troops to engage in more dangerous operations, over a longer period of time, were growing more persistent, and the White House was talking about building permanent bases in central Asia.

No exit from this dreadful place is in sight.

The barren landscape of that tortured land had begun to look more and more like the quagmire that I had expected it would become from the beginning. Afghanistan was, had been, is and would always be in the future, “a populated disaster.” But we were there, and it was here, everywhere. We could not avoid it.

“We shudder to recall the times through which we have lived,” the wonderful, frumpy Homebody says as she sits next to her frilly lampshade, “the Recent Past, about which no one wants to think.” We did not want to think about it, but we could think of nothing else. The blow had sucked all the wind out of us, and we were still gasping for breath months later. It had been hard to reach out for entertainment. Escapist distractions had seemed too trivial, and until this play, there had been few connections, few insights to this benighted, corrupt place halfway round the world with which suddenly our immediate destiny seemed intertwined.

To write so many prescient lines completely out of one's imagination, and then for colossal, unforeseen world events to impart such resonance to them … what an accomplishment! My admiration for the playwright soars. I am envious.

The day before my night at the theatre, I had contributed further to undermining my artistic evening. I thought it would be good preparation to see Mohsen Makhmalbaf's film Kandahar. There on the big screen was the real Afghanistan of sand dunes and jagged, desolate mountains, of chaos and thievery, of bird-like women behind their blue pleated bird-cage costumes, of primitive mullahs and hate-filled madrassases, of transportation by horse cart and bare feet, of bewildering, unfathomable, warring tribes—Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Pashtunes—of ever-shifting loyalties, of mines and Mujahadeen, of bombed-out towns whose mud brick ruins are only suggested by the set of Homebody/Kabul

So I bring the baggage of reality to the theatre on West 4th Street; but who in this theatre can leave that baggage at home? Toward the end of the play when the corrupted diplomat Quango says, “Have you noticed, nearly every other man you meet here is missing pieces?”, the vision of the stumps of mine-shattered legs and arms that I had seen in Khandahar flashed into my mind.

And it is this populated disaster, this mutilated hand of a country that America has committed itself to embrace and to civilize and (could it really be?) to democratize. The Homebody uses the wonderful phrase “Universal Drift.” But this is more about the American Drift. And our open-ended commitment as a nation to this terrible place is made by a president who had been elected on the platform that we could not go everywhere in the world as its policeman.

“I hold on tight to his ruined right hand,” the Homebody says in her fantasy, “and he leads me on a guided tour through his city.” And then a few lines later, once you understand the metaphor of the grossly dismembered hand, she says, “Would you make love to a stranger with a mutilated hand if the opportunity was offered to you?” And then, as if it were Bush or Rumsfeld answering: “Might do.”

Kushner and I share an unusual bond. As he had written his play about an obscure place of medieval attitudes and barbaric practices that suddenly and unexpectedly became germane to a new American “war on terrorism,” so I had written a book about an obscure 800-year-old story of a medieval crusade that had reportedly become required reading in the Bush White House. For, in his diatribes from the caves of Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden had railed against the “Jewish-Christian crusade” against Islam and all Arab peoples. In his construction, this was a struggle of believers versus infidels, East versus West, Christianity versus Islam, Godless secularism versus spiritualism, the United States versus al Qaeda. In his megalomania and narcissism, bin Laden had succeeded in personalizing the struggle. And President Bush had helped the villain mightily on Sept. 16 by declaring that America's struggle was a “crusade” against terrorism. Bush would use the word only once, but once was enough. It was a gift to bin Laden. Now it was bin Laden versus Bush.

And so people have been saying to me that, after reading about the 12th-century conflict in the Third Crusade between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in Warriors of God, they understand the situation in the Middle East much better.

As I left the theatre after Homebody/Kabul, I overheard people saying the same thing. But what did they understand better? What insights did they glean after 3 hours and 45 minutes in the theatre? What could a stage play convey that we didn't already know from the newspapers and the television?

It begins with the power of romance. In her dusty and musty London flat, the Homebody sits alone in the absence of her waspish, uptight, priggish scientist-husband Milton and her screwed-up daughter Priscilla (in whose adolescent horrors the mother acknowledges responsibility and guilt).

“But guilt? Personal guilt?” she muses. “No more useful or impressive than adult nappy rash, and nearly as unsightly, and ought to be kept as private, ought guilt, as any other useless unimpressive unsightly inflammation. Not suitable for public exchange.”

To divert herself from these unpleasant thoughts, the Homebody turns to her outdated guidebook. She reads with fascination and zest about great, virile men in long-forgotten wars, about the hill tribes of the Kabul Valley in the times before Christ, about the Great Bactrian Confusion, whatever that was. (The mere words, falling off her limber tongue, excite her.)

Her boring life revolves around her safe kitchen and her comfy living-room table with its frilly shaded lamp. And then by chance, as she searches for funny hats to enliven a party she will give (and dreads) for her husband's dull friends—where the revelers are to celebrate some incomprehensible minor technical achievement—she has a chance encounter with an Afghan merchant who sells her 10 exotic hats. As he prepares her bill, she notices that three fingers of his hand have been evenly sliced off.

Back home, she spins an elaborate fantasy of how, beyond morbid fascination, she might have reacted. Magically, she acquires the facility to speak fluent Pashtu and musters up unthinkable courage to ask what happened to his fingers. His imaginary answer gives us one of the great moments of the Homebody's monologue. But the lines have resonance largely because of what we witnessed in our newspapers and on television last fall, as one warlord after another switched loyalties and told outrageous lies, and we gained the distinct impression that in this land where fundamental Islam was practiced, and where the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice held sway, no one believed in anything, much less the truth.

The Homebody's Confrontation with the terrible emptiness of her life leads to her disappearance. The playwright has her act on her romance, even if it means going to an unimaginably awful place, where she can take on the burqua, submit to a husband as his second or third wife, devote herself, unthinking like a teenager in a madrassa, to committing the entire Koran to memory. She acts on her romance, and she sticks to it. She has rejected the values of her home, of her life, of her society, of the West. In her act is the whiff of meta-physical treason.

The extraordinary act of the Homebody prefigures a similar act this past fall by a real-life romantic, who no doubt is every bit as screwed up as Priscilla. That is the American Taliban, John Walker. He also rejected the pleasures of his California culture of hot tubs and mood music, converted to Islam, joined the Taliban, fought at Masar-i-Sharif, was captured … and, perhaps most surprisingly, was uncontrite and unrepentant. He too sticks to his romance, however misguided and incomprehensible it may be to most of us. And the price of Walker's phantasmagoria has been a potential charge of treason.

The family agony of Milton and Priscilla in searching for the missing Homebody makes good theatre, especially Milton's descent into drugs under the tutelage of the dissipated diplomat-junkie, Quango. Quango reminded me of characters in the colonial novels of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and he is meant to represent the corruption of the colonial. Afghanistan, he claims, has broken his heart, as well as blown his mind to bits. “It's like a disease, this place,” he tells Milton. If Milton does not really care whether he finds his estranged wife, Priscilla's search for her mother is real and powerful.

Indeed, family agony drives the entire second act, and it has about it the air of Greek tragedy. No doubt, a few years ago, when Kushner conceived of this play, he put his emphasis on the characterization of the family, never dreaming that the ambience around them could drive the play just as powerfully. In 1999, who really cared about the Taliban or the Pashtun?

The most original and telling characters of Homebody/Kabul, at least as the play is seen in the wake of Sept. 11, are two Afghan characters, the Taliban Mullah and the woman Mahala. Both the Mullah and Mahala would seem to be secondary roles, but they speak most pointedly to the situation America now faces in central Asia.

It is the monsters, of course, who always fascinate us. Who are these barbarians anyway who force women into cloth cages and deny them work, who chop off hands and arms for petty crime, who bake their victims in locked metal containers in the desert, who blow up 2,000-year-old statues, who have a special stadium for public executions? … and who for all that, purport to be holy men?

The Mullah Al Aftar Durranni makes his brief appearances on stage count. As Act 2 opens, we see him as the impresario of what seems to be an outrageous lie: that the Homebody is not only dead, but she literally has been torn limb from limb by the “rough boys” of Kabul, who have caught her improperly dressed without a burqua and in possession of debauched Western music. Frank Sinatra corrupts. Frank Sinatra is to be feared and suppressed. With wonderful menace, the Mullah says, “Impious music, which is an affront to Islam, to dress like so and then the music, these are regrettable.”

Presenting the unfeeling face of the religious fanatic, his manner is cold, official, patronizing. “Kabul is not a city for Western tourist women,” he says. Indeed, it is no place for a Western woman of any sort, as we saw countless times on our televisions this past fall, as intrepid women reporters braved the humiliations, the hardships and the real dangers to get the inside story. “We do not want them. No thing may be made or unmade unless Allah wills it. He fills our hearts with griefs, to see if we shall be strong. You are kaafer, you do not understand, but this is Allah's way.” With such a credo, we see how atrocity is possible, everywhere, by anyone, for any reason. It is sanctioned, and even sanctified by God, just to see if the holy warrior is strong. As counterpoint to the Homebody's early reveling in history, the Mullah says blandly: “In Kabul now there is no history. There is only God.”

Toward the end of the second act, the Mullah reappears in a dramatic and violent scene, and in it he delivers the rationale for the Taliban regime. When I read it in the script, the speech seemed simplistic and ignorant. But when played on the stage, his apologia has power and poignancy … and even a kind of truth to it.

“Afghanistan is Taliban and we shall save it,” the Mullah says in his stylized patois. “No one else shall, no one else care. England betray us. United States betray us, bomb us, starve us to … distract [the world from the] adulterous debauch Clinton and his young whore. This is good for woman? U.S. and Russia destroy us as destroy Vietnam, Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia. … As U.N. deny Taliban to be recognize. All plot against Islam. Iran plot against Islam. For four thousand years, no one shall save Afghan people. No one else but Allah may save it. We are servants of Allah.”

In other words, the excuse for collective religious terror boils down to cruel order. The alternative, going back no doubt to the Great Bactrian Confusion, is chaos and exploitation.

My differing responses to the script and the performance suggest one way that the theatre trumps television and newsprint in making us understand. All fall, the newspapers and newsmagazines had been confounded by Arab wrath. Why do they hate us so? The question echoed from the building tops.

What the theatre can display, better than any other medium, is passion. This includes the passion of the Arab religious fanatic and the passion of his most immediate victims. That passion is something the West desperately needs to understand … in its own best interest. For this struggle has not been about ideas or religious tenets. In Arab psychology, everything is mixed together in an emotional stew: the oppression of history, the hatred of Israel and all European invaders going back to the 11th century, the ire against Israel's supporters, the envy of American wealth, self-loathing at the inability to master science and technology, the contempt for weak leadership of the Arab world itself, horror at the disparity between the princes and the paupers, and the sheer grinding poverty and backwardness of the entire region. All that is left is passion and religion … and in its worst despairing form, martyrdom.

It is from the mouth of the character Mahala in Homebody/Kabul that the counter-argument to the Taliban is forcefully delivered. She is a fascinating theatrical invention: the intelligent, bitter librarian, forced away from work, watching her library closed, losing her mind from disuse and her wits from the oppression both of her society and her household, the spurned wife of the doctor who has driven her from her house and (she is convinced) replaced her summarily with this docile, sentimental Westerner, the Homebody. Mahala is the most sympathetic of victims.

At Milton and Priscilla, the English travelers, she flies into a rage about the Taliban. They are occupiers, drug dealers, child murderers, torturers, Pashtun from the camps of Khandahar and Jalalabad who oppress all non-Pashtun. And then she turns her wrath on her Afghan translator. “And you call yourselves men. You suffer? We suffer more. You permit this? These criminals and savages to enslave and oppress your women? … I say women are braver than you men of Kabul.”

Her rant is riveting, and as she turns her wrath on them all, Kushner can even squeeze a laugh from the scene.

“Usually she is cheerier,” her Afghan companion whispers.

And when another witness suggests that she may be going mad, Priscilla interjects, “She isn't mad, she's fucking furious. It isn't at all the same.”

For this audience in the East Village of New York, the city that is the ultimate Western victim of Afghanistan-bred terror, the tension is highest when Mahala turns on America for its role in the horror of Afghanistan. In the wake of Sept. 11, these thoughts are seldom expressed—especially since, as victims, we Americans like to think we occupy the high moral ground. Unlike the Homebody, Mahala has no qualms about assigning guilt. In the face of Taliban atrocity, where is America? she asks. And then the charges fly. Afghanistan was used as an instrument to topple the Soviet Union and end the Cold War, and then the instrument was discarded. The CIA funded the Taliban secretly through Pakistan, exploiting her land as a buffer for Iran, against whom the U.S. was still trying to settle a 20-year-old score. Always the frontline surrogate. Always someone else's tool. In the editorial pages and news magazines, these are familiar charges. And yet from the mouth of the female victim, they carry greater weight.

Of the Taliban, Mahala says, “They'll turn on their masters sooner or later.”

And so they did, and for their complicity in the horrendous crime of Sept. 11, they have been destroyed as a result. But the conditions that led to their rise remain. The gangster bin Laden is mentioned only once in Homebody/Kabul; George Bush, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, al Qaeda, Tora Bora, not at all. We see no American flags fluttering on this stage, hear no macho one-liners from a Wild West American president. This is a play for those who are interested in the root causes that preceded Sept. 11, for those who can see through the fog of patriotism to the finer distinctions, who are finally ready to ask how on earth do we get out of this godforsaken place, who can bear to contemplate the thought that we have participated to some extent in our own tragedy.

The most shocking line of the play is left to Mahala.

“You love the Taliban so much. … Well, don't worry, they're coming to New York! Americans!”