[In the following review, Brustein criticizes Homebody/Kabul, commenting that the events of the play seem inconsequential in light of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, and asserts the play is lacking in focus, direction, and unity of theme.]

Tony Kushner may be the luckiest and the unluckiest dramatist in town. Having had the foresight to write a play about Afghanistan before the September 11 attacks, he opened it last December, with America's presence in the area still dominating the front pages. That was the lucky part. It was also the unlucky part. The destruction of the World Trade Center and America's subsequent pursuit of the Taliban and Al Qaeda has radically altered our consciousness about that country in a way that no prophet could have possibly foreseen.

As a result, Homebody/Kabul, which recently completed a run at the New York Theatre Workshop, is a schizophrenic entity, at the same time relevant to the point of prescience and woefully out-of-date. Most of the play takes place in Kabul in 1998, and includes references to “another U.S. bombing” (of the terrorist camp at Khost) and how it missed Osama bin Laden and killed a number of innocents. But Kushner's account of a British father and daughter searching for a family member who disappeared after a tourist trip to Kabul seems particularly inconsequential against the background of the cataclysmic political events that have since transpired.

I saw the play twice, having attended a preview too early in the run to be allowed to review it. When I returned a few weeks later, after it had been exposed to the public and the critics, I could detect no major changes, aside from the deepening of some performances. The problem is that the play was virtually crying out for revision after September 11. Although the action takes place three years earlier, it is now impossible to imagine these Western characters circulating among the Taliban without thinking of abductions, corpses, bomb craters, detention camps, and the recent terrorist attacks.

On second thought, instead of trying to update his play, Kushner might better have employed his energies trying to find some unity for it, or at least settling on what it was supposed to be about in the first place. I say this with profound respect for Kushner's talents. He is one of the very few dramatists now writing whose works are contributions to literature as well as to theater. (Stoppard is only a pretender to that crown.) What he lacks at present is not substance, eloquence, intelligence, or emotional power—he has those qualities in abundance, along with the Orwellian gift of being able to take the spiritual temperature of a people with a political thermometer.

Where Kushner falls short is in his formal control. Distracted by too many subjects at once, he often suffers from a divided focus. Beginning with the epic Angels in America, Kushner's plays have tended to be sprawling extravaganzas that suffer not so much from a deficit of sensibility as from a surplus of it. They display the literary equivalent of overacting: overwriting. (Homebody/Kabul is almost four hours long.) Kushner is one of the few playwrights who publicly acknowledge and even seem to advertise a need for a dramaturg—the current production boasts two.

Yet his material is still sorely in need of dramaturgical attention. As its odd title suggests, this is a bifurcated work in which the second part bears only a tangential relation to the first. What links them is a character, the Homebody, though by the time we get to Kabul she is just a hovering memory, having disappeared into the city after being brutally murdered and dismembered between the acts. (That is one explanation of how she vanished—Kushner provides some others.) Fully realized in the monologue that begins the play, she evaporates into a subject for regret and remorse in the longer section that ends it, which is far more preoccupied with a disintegrating family (widowed father and raging daughter) in an exotic country, losing their innocence among con men, junkies, fanatics, poets, and brutal despots.

This makes the opening monologue a bit of a tease—rather like the killing of Janet Leigh twenty minutes into Psycho. Finishing off the Homebody takes somewhat longer (her monologue lasts about an hour). But for the time that she is with us, she is an entirely winning presence. I suspect that this inveterate tourist was largely inspired by Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India, though there are echoes of the ruminating matrons of Virginia Woolf and perhaps the loquacious Violet Venable of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly Last Summer. A bit dotty, as infatuated with travel as she is intoxicated with language, the Homebody addresses us directly from a chair in her London home, using her guidebook to Afghanistan (based on Nancy Hatch Dupree's An Historical Guide to Kabul) as the basis for an investigation into the history, mores, and geography of this blighted land.

The Homebody's fascination with Afghanistan allows Kushner not only to turn his scholarly research into a theatrical metaphor, but also to make her compulsive nattering (“unregenerate chatterer that I am”) into a medium for his own logorrhea. It is exhilarating to be engaged with this character's appetite for adventure, her embrace of life (“Oh, I love the world! I love love love love the world!”), though she has lost all feeling for a husband who is repelled by the very things about her that attract us most: “My husband cannot bear my—the sound of me and has threatened to leave on this account and so I rarely speak to him anymore.” It is not surprising to learn that both are on anti-depressants. One way she fights her depression at this point is with her trip to Kabul.

What is most engaging about the Homebody is her intellectual curiosity. Her wandering mind has the capacity to go from the abstract and eternal to the specific and quotidian. A discourse on Third World hats (“abbreviated fez-like pillboxy attenuated yarmulkite millinarisms, um, hats”) turns into a discourse on human history, on guilt and causality. And just as swiftly it becomes the occasion for an account of a real or imagined affair with a Muslim hatmaker in London after she bought one of his sartorial products. Her diction is pitch perfect, and so is her self-understanding: “Where stands the Homebody, safe in her kitchen, on her culpable shore, suffering uselessly watching others perishing in the sea, wringing her plump little maternal hands, oh, oh.” (That self-denigrating “oh, oh” is particularly good.) This monologue, a major feat of memory and persistence, is delivered with force and grace by Linda Emond. It is the most nuanced writing and acting of the season.

The bridge to the second, less effective part of the play is a Frank Sinatra tune, “It's Nice to Go Trav'ling.” The Homebody's passion for Sinatra (“such an awful man, such perfect perfect music”), combined with her love of travel, has proved to be fatal. Her headphones are now one of the few remaining relics of her existence (in addition to three hats and her guidebook). She was presumably murdered because of “this impious music which is an affront to Islam” and because she was not wearing a burqa while walking in the streets of Kabul listening to it.

The next three hours of the play are taken up with the consequences of this clash of cultures. Gathered in a hotel room in Kabul as if at a wake are the Homebody's husband, Milton; her daughter, Priscilla; a British aid worker named Quango Twistleton; a mullah; and a Muslim doctor. They are discussing the fate of the Homebody in gruesome detail, before Priscilla, like Isis preparing to piece together the remains of her mutilated brother Osiris, goes off on a quest for her mother's missing body (she ends up finding the putative grave of Cain). The suspense of the play lies in the question of whether the Homebody is dead or whether she has eloped with a Muslim. This question is never fully resolved, though the people who press for the second option are obviously conning the family. But it is not plot that absorbs the playwright's attention. Kushner seems more interested in examining the impact of Afghanistan's competing customs on the innocent Western consciousness.

His other interest is the impact of the Afghan atmosphere on the mental health of his central characters. Milton, an electronics engineer, comes increasingly under the influence of Quango, whose mind has been blown by the country and by the extremely cheap drugs he can acquire there. (“Why else would I be here? Afghanistan supplies the world.”) He and Milton will share an opium pipe and a heroin needle before the evening is over. The obscene, angry, vaguely suicidal Priscilla—“a virago dedicated to punishing everyone she's indebted to”—falls under the influence of an Esperanto poet named Khwaja, who is probably using her to smuggle anti-Taliban codes out of the country.

Much incident follows without ever adding up to a coherent story, climaxed by the most dramatic scene in the play—Priscilla is apprehended by Taliban police for carrying military information (the poems in Esperanto) out of the country for the Northern Alliance, and the Kabuli woman whom she has agreed to take with her is almost shot. The final scene takes place back in London, with the Afghan woman living in the family's home, sleeping with Milton, and tending to the garden that the Homebody neglected, having replaced her in every possible way.

With the exception of the Homebody, all of the Western characters are singularly unappealing, and the occasional anti-Western sentiments that we overhear suggest that this is deliberate. Milton (Dylan Baker) is a sour drudge; Priscilla (Kelly Hutchinson) is a whining bore; and Quango (Bill Camp) is a self-hating drugged-out sexual opportunist out of Graham Greene. Under the pinpoint direction of Declan Donnellan, though, almost all the parts are filled by very good actors, not only those mentioned but also Joseph Kamal, Yusef Bulos, and Rita Wolf. (The exception is Hutchinson, who, unable to find any variety for her role—not surprisingly, given its one-dimensional character—settles for undifferentiated screeching.) Nick Ormerod's set, a decaying pile of bricks and rubble, makes excellent use of the New York Theatre Workshop stage in handling the multiple locations. Indeed, the entire production seems to have been fashioned by first-rate professionals.

But Homebody/Kabul, alas, is an errant and wandering play. I can think of no other writer who could have handled this difficult subject in such an intelligent manner. And it is encouraging to see that Kushner has other subjects on his mind than homoerotic relationships. But it is maddening to find Kushner's large talents dissipated in a work that never quite seems to know where it is going. Thanks to the Homebody, we leave the theater having learned a lot more about Afghanistan than we knew when we came. But it is knowledge that has not been sufficiently rooted in either the human events of the play or the events of recent history.