[In the following review, Phelan compares productions of Homebody/Kabul staged in New York and in Berkeley, California. Phelan asserts that the first act of the play is stronger than the second act.]

Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul was the winner of the Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner award for best play of 2001. Kushner began writing Homebody/Kabul about three years before “Taliban,” “Northern Alliance,” “burqa,” and “Afghanistan” became the lingua franca of denizens of the United States. Indelibly linked now with the events of 9/11/01, Kushner's play has been widely declared “eerily prescient.” To his credit, Kushner dismisses this hype: “I'm not psychic. If you choose to write about current events there's a good chance you will find the events you've written about to be … well, current” (Homebody/Kabul. TCG 2002: 146). Kushner recognizes that plays must have something to say that exceeds the pressing tension of the present tense. I had the opportunity to see Kushner's play twice on opposite coasts in the space of eight months and this experience confirmed, once more, how accelerated the present tense is in an era of postmodernism.

In the New York Theatre Workshop production, directed by Declan Donnellan, the sheer length of the play—it was over four hours on opening night—led to a certain frustrated impatience on the audience's part. Even more dismaying was the fall in quality between the mesmerizing Homebody and the meandering plot of Kabul. In the production at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Kabul had been cut substantially, and Tony Taccone's direction was more aggressive and faster paced than Donnellan's. Moreover, in the eight months between the opening of the play and its Berkeley run, the situation in Kabul had been radically altered, making the political urgency of some of Kushner's comments about the Taliban's hold on the city seem already dated, rather than “eerily prescient.” Finally, the psychological terrain between downtown New York twelve weeks after the destruction of the World Trade Center and Berkeley forty weeks later was also dramatically different. In New York, the play was seen primarily in terms of the attack on the city—there's a line in the play about the Taliban coming to New York—while in Berkeley, the reception of the play concerned Kushner's love affair with language.

The first hour and ten minutes of the play, the Homebody monologue, demonstrates Kushner's considerable gifts: his writing is fluent, evocative, and emotionally and intellectually expansive. Joining the aesthetics of theatrical minimalism—a woman sitting on a chair for seventy minutes talking—with language of such baroque intensity that the slightest physical gesture seems unbearably distracting, the monologue is completely captivating. The Homebody, an English woman who has an unhappy marriage, takes anti-depressants, worries about her daughter, “for whom alas nothing seems to go well,” and reads and speaks obsessively. She begins the monologue quoting from Nancy Hatch Dupree's tour guide, An Historical Guide to Kabul, published in 1965 and thus completely out of date: “Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 BC. …” This sense of historical time-lag is crucial to Kushner's political polemic. To understand anything about the rise of the Taliban, Kushner insists, one needs to think through the extraordinarily brutal history of Afghanistan. The monologue places Kabul, a city now so newly near for US audiences, in a vast historical setting that continually displaces and defers the possibility of dramatic or political resolution. The sometimes maddeningly long sentences of the Homebody bespeak the difficulty of finding a way to reach closure about Kabul.

In New York, Linda Edmond was brilliant as Homebody. She performed the long monologue with verve and wit, and more impressively, she conveyed a profound sadness and despair about her loneliness even in—perhaps especially in—her most comic moments. In Berkeley, Michelle Moran emphasized the Homebody's frailty in physical terms. She had a cane placed in front of her chair, and when she moved at all, it seemed to require all of her attention. This approach also worked but it sometimes suggested that the Homebody's suffering was largely external. Edmond was so good she managed to make Kushner's beautiful, but perhaps somewhat naive, conceits seem plausible: that if we learn how to surrender without violence to the mystery of the unknown in the same way we surrender to the ineffable mystery of words, we might one day be—if not exactly saved—at least capable of finding and offering love, still a hugely transformative force in the world. The Homebody longs for love at least as much as she craves the right words. She, her husband, and daughter “all loved one another, once, but today it simply isn't so or isn't what it used to be, it's … well, love.” The disappointment in that last “love” structures her indefatigable rhetorical aspirations; she knows that her husband and daughter resent her love for books, her way of speaking, and her interest in mystery. But because she loves the world, and the words that make up the world, she is unable to stop attempting to experience the world as precisely as language allows.

The Homebody's husband is a scientist, and her daughter is unemployed. All three are anxious. She and her husband both take “powerful antidepressants.” She says, “his pills have one name and mine another. I frequently take his pills instead of mine so I can know what he's feeling. … [A]s far as I know he never takes my pills but ingests only his own, which are yellow and red, while mine are green and creamy-white; and I find his refusal to sample dull. A little dull” (13). Dullness is a vice to be avoided for the Homebody. She decides to have a party, even though her history as a successful party host has not been great. In the spirit of Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, Homebody decides to buy, not the flowers, but the party hats, herself. She goes to a shop run by Afghan refugees and selects ten festive hats. As she pays for them she realizes that the shopkeeper has a mutilated hand: “Three fingers on his right hand have been hacked off, following the line of a perfect clean diagonal from middle to ring to little finger. …” She entertains many different possible causes, all contradictory—“my name is in the files if they haven't been destroyed, the names I gave are in the files, there are no more files”—until all the explanations seem both excessive and impoverished. Before long, the Homebody, suddenly fluent in Pushto, finds herself under a tree in Kabul where, she says, “the hat merchant and I make love beneath a chinair tree. … We kiss, his breath is very bitter; he places his hand inside me, it seems to me his whole hand inside me, it seems to me a whole hand.” Then, just as suddenly, she is back in the London hat shop. The shift in time and space is startlingly and slightly unnerving, but it helps prepare us for the larger shift between the confined world of the Homebody's English living room and the war-torn city of Kabul, where the rest of the play takes place. But while the Homebody's (imaginative) journey to Kabul is motivated by some combination of love, lust, curiosity, boredom, and hopefulness, her family's journey there is motivated by her apparent murder.

Act 2 begins in Kabul with a doctor explaining to the Homebody's husband and daughter that her body has been found. The doctor goes on at excruciating length explaining the nature of her injuries, which are brutal. The doctor's report is arranged by Quango Twistleton, an opium addict living in Kabul for the drugs who also works for a British NGO. Played with especial cunning by Bill Camp in the New York production, Quango is a fascinating character. He befriends the Homebody's husband, Milton Ceiling, and falls for Priscilla, their daughter. Milton, comically eager to get out of Kabul as fast as possible, readily accepts the doctor's explanations about his wife's death, but Priscilla finds everything about her mother's trip to Kabul incomprehensible and cannot believe anything the doctor says. She determines to investigate on her own. After a very complicated series of events, the Ceilings find themselves traveling back to England with neither the Homebody nor her corpse, but with the equally talkative Mahala, an Afghani librarian with no books to order. As Milton and Mahala begin to communicate tentatively, one sees Kushner's overall point more clearly. An exploration of the allure and impossibility of a universal language, Homebody/Kabul surveys the wreckage produced by faith-based wars, and the ruins produced by the hunger for power that we call colonialism and imperialism in the public sphere and call the family in the private sphere. But without these systems, Kushner is also honest enough to ask, what might save us from total brutality?

The Dewey decimal system, a universal language Kushner is willing to employ, tries to organize human knowledge coherently. It gives his play a rhizomic structure. Dewey's 000s are reserved for “facts and books about books.” Hence, the bibliophile Homebody and the Librarian stand as bookends, quite literally, for the rest of the play's relationship to knowledge. The 100s are dedicated to materials “about great ideas and thinking”: thus the Esperanto poet-philosopher and the Sufi mystic guide Priscilla thought great ideas. The 200s catalog books about God and religion: Kushner, in some of the best writing in the second part of the play, speculates about the relationship between Kabul and Cain—if Cain was buried there, as some evidence suggests, does the ghost of the first murderer curse the city? The 300s include materials about tourism, folklore, anthropology, and crime: Kabul concerns a crime allegedly committed against an English woman in Afghanistan, and the investigation, such as it is, is overseen by a British junkie. The 400s are devoted to languages; Kushner's play employs French, Russian, English, Pushto, and Dari. The 500s cover ideas about nature and physics: Kushner indexes them via Milton Ceiling's scientific discourse and Quango's analysis of the geo-economics of oil and heroin. The 600s catalog works about medicine, and the Doctor's almost endless description of the Homebody's wounds represents that aspect of knowledge. The 700s concern material about art, and in addition to Kushner's own achievement as a playwright, the character Khwaja, the Esperanto poet who volunteers to be Priscilla's tour guide, the songs of Frank Sinatra, the poetry of anonymous seventh-century Persians, and the novels of P. G. Wodehouse are just some of the references to art in Kushner's play. The 800s are devoted to storytellers and their stories, and all of Kushner's characters are extraordinary storytellers, especially Quango and the Homebody. Finally in the 900s, one will find tour guides, and this is Kushner's point of departure.

Both productions did a better job staging Homebody than staging Kabul. The failure to sustain a coherent plot in a city overrun with plots is no sin. But Kushner is too valuable a voice in US theatre to forget, even momentarily, the difference between encounters with the ineffable and stories of imperialist and economic plunder. Kushner's habit of mind alerts him to the hideous violence the United States has done in the world, and while he continually reminds us of the vast complexity and long duration of the history of Afghanistan, all too often he wants to make the United States the “cause” of the disaster. But to place the United States as prime-mover everywhere and forever is to fall into the trap of considering it as it prefers to be considered: as only and forever the super-power. This falsifies the history of the world. Therefore, despite Kushner's best intentions, the agonizing drama of Afghanistan is not yet staged in Homebody/Kabul.