[In the following review, Hornby asserts that, while Homebody/Kabul is written in a formless style, it is a major play by an important playwright.]

George Bernard Shaw once said that when he wrote his plays, he never thought about plot. Instead, he just created some characters and “let 'em rip.” This reaction against the well-made plays that dominated the late nineteenth-century stage continues in our own day, with playwrights spewing out dialog at random. Some, like Samuel Beckett, have consciously applied the free association technique of psychoanalysis, letting the talk go where it will, ad-lib, never censoring or revising. This risky method can of course result in pompous drivel when the writer lacks Beckett's discipline, intelligence, vast reading, and strong sense of characterization, but it can also yield a strange poetic intensity. Plot is all but dead in today's theatre; imagery, both visual and verbal, reigns supreme.

The plays of Tony Kushner exemplify the formless style. It is hard to say what Angels in America was about, much less describe its plot. At the beginning, Prior is diagnosed as having AIDS; after six hours of playing time, and several years of his life, he is still struggling along, the playwright unable to bring the obvious closure to his story. Diverse characters, including Roy Cohn, the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, several of Prior's ancestors, and the Mormon angel Moroni, wander through. Even Shaw or Beckett would provide more focus. What makes the play work is the incredible drive the characters have. The speeches may ramble, but they are not mere reverie; the characters are obsessed with reaching an understanding, which they then drive home to their listeners. Narrative in drama works only when it is motivated for the speaker, and when it has a strong effect on the listeners. (Even with Beckett, we feel that the monologs are character-driven, rather than simply being eruptions from his unconscious mind.) When Roy Cohn rambles on that “homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows. Who have zero clout,” he is not just making a philosophical observation, but creating a whole raison d'être, a rationalization for his own homosexuality, with which he overwhelms his listener. “Does that sound like me, Henry?” Roy sneers. He has sex with men, but by his definition he is categorically not homosexual, not a wimp.

Kushner's long-awaited new play, his first new full-length play in over a decade (unless you count his translation/adaptation of Corneille's The Illusion), awkwardly titled Homebody/Kabul, begins with a thirty-minute monolog by an Englishwoman, the homebody, in her London sitting room. “I speak elliptically, discursively,” she admits, babbling about an obsolete guidebook to Kabul, Afghanistan, which she holds on her lap. The book is thirty-three years old, “long enough for Christ to have been born and died on the cross,” a remark that is, typically, superfluous and soon forgotten. Heavily dosed with antidepressants (like Harper with her tranquilizers in Angels), she imagines her brain floating in a salt bath.

As usual with Kushner, this spontaneous gobbledygook is spellbinding. It is delivered directly to the audience, a departure for Kushner, whose previous monologs were never soliloquies. Yet in a sense this monolog is not a soliloquy either; we the audience become partners in the scene, like the silent Henry with the Roy Cohn monolog. At one point during the performance I witnessed, an audience member even gave out an audible, knowing “Ah!”, as the homebody read from another book on the history of Afghanistan. She is obsessed with that exotic, sad country, and desperate to share her obsession with us. Of course, the scene was all the more poignant because of the September 11 atrocities and the subsequent, ongoing war, but that result was serendipitous. The play was written well before Afghanistan was in the news; in fact, I first saw the monolog, presented alone, three years ago in London, where it worked just as well as in the full-scale production.

The monolog ends with the homebody displaying ten Afghan caps she has bought. The shopkeeper who sold them to her appears, takes her hand, and leads her along a road; we have moved seamlessly to Kabul. This appears to be a drug-induced fantasy, but after an intermission we get a medical report with hard facts. The woman was dragged through the streets of Kabul, beaten by ten persons, and torn apart, all for not wearing a burka.

The remainder of the play, which goes on for several more hours, consists of the homebody's neurotic daughter in a quest to find her mother, or her dead body. As with Dorothy on the road to Oz, however, the goal of her journey is not so important as the weird individuals and dangerous adventures she encounters en route. She is nearly killed for taking off her burka in the street and lighting up a cigarette, but is saved by an elderly Afghan who turns out to be an Esperanto poet. She meets her father, who is more interested in boozing and shooting up heroin (readily available in Afghanistan) with a diplomat friend than in his wife or daughter. There is a “madwoman” who is actually an Afghan feminist escaping to London, and the hat seller again, who quotes Sinatra lyrics like poems (“You can go to extremes with impossible dreams!”), while insisting that the homebody is alive and well, a happy convert to Islam, living the sequestered life of an Afghan woman under the Taliban.

Nothing, then, is ever what it seems in Homebody/Kabul. We never see the homebody again, though whether it is because she is dead, or because she has become an enthusiast for poverty and enslavement (Afghanistan is ranked only the fifth worst country in the world for women, “because they do not practice genital mutilation”), remains obscure. The madwoman escapes to London, but the Esperanto poet is killed, because the Taliban believed his poems were coded messages to the West.

Where Angels was subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Homebody/Kabul might be subtitled “An American Fantasia on Orientalist Themes.” We never learn much about Afghanistan, which remains exotic and ambiguous, but we learn a lot about American attitudes toward that benighted country, with its dysfunctional government and its obdurate religion. As in Angels, there are underlying motifs of drugs and dreams (e.g., the Sinatra song lyric), which are really what the play is about. We are thus never sure what we see is really happening, nor what we hear is true. Yet there is also a hard core of miscommunication, repression, and suffering. Our dreams about Islamic fundamentalism ultimately matter, as they did on September 11, when we all woke up with a series of bangs.

Homebody/Kabul is a major new play by one of our best playwrights. Despite the horrors of September, it did not get the attention it deserved, nor a particularly long run off-Broadway, where it ran for a few months last winter. This may be because the production, at the New York Theatre Workshop, was lackluster. Directing and designs were by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, two talented Englishmen with outstanding records in their native land, but whose talents did not weather the cross-Atlantic trip. Donnellan could not get much out of the American cast. None of the English accents was convincing, for example, while several of the performances were wooden. Bill Camp camped his way through the role of the diplomat, for example, though the character is supposedly heterosexual, hot for the daughter; even worse, he played the entire role with a grimace frozen on his face. Linda Edmond did a nice job with the homebody's monolog, finding ample depths and contrasts in it, but she disappeared, as noted, after the first half-hour. In the role of her daughter, which becomes central, Kelly Hutchinson was weepy and monotonous, avoiding the considerable wit and strength in the role as it is written. None of the actors came anywhere near the depth and intensity of Joe Mantello and Stephen Spinella as the gay lovers in Angels, for instance, nor the astonishing swagger of Ron Leibman as Cohn.

The greatest weakness of the production, however, was in its designs. Ormerod showed resourcefulness and imagination in depicting the bleak landscape of Afghanistan, counterpointed by the sterile interiors of the tourist hotels, but succeeded only in making the play drably realistic. As in Angels, the true location of the play is in the dreams of its characters, who are typically on drugs or alcohol, or are neurotic, or are outright insane. Thus Angels, in its three separate productions in London, Los Angeles, and on Broadway in New York, had multi-million-dollar settings capable of extravagant, magical transformations. Kushner is not a playwright for low-budget, understated, off-Broadway renditions. Surely the granting agencies could have come up with some serious money, as they did in the past, for this important young American playwright! Homebody/Kabul is not a PBS documentary, but an Arabian Nights for our time.