NYC

In coalition with theater artists, grassroots activists and community supporters, THAW and Kathleen Chalfant, Tony Kushner, Denis O'Hare, Danny Hoch, Malachy McCourt, Andre Gregory, Anne Waldman, Kia Corthron, Robert O'Hara, Betty Shamieh Invite you to

BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE

A benefit evening in support of the Al-Rowwad Palestinian Children's Theater

Monday, June 13 at the Culture Project

Scheduled Benefit performers include: Tony Kushner, Denis O'Hare, NPR's Bob Holman, Henry Chalfant, Anne Waldman, Kia Corthron, Betty Shamieh, Juliana Francis, Matana Roberts, Alan Licht, Mahina Movement, Paul Brill, Maysoon Zayid and Nibras' Leila Buck and Najla Said, Nathalie Handal, Adam Matta, Betsy Andrews, Brian Satz & Jose Joaquin Garcia

Taking place courtesy of THAW Member Theater Nevada Shakespeare Company during a dark night of their run of A Single Woman, the benefit features an array of acclaimed playwrights, poets, theater performers and musicians, all in support of this extraordinary troupe of young people.

In late June 2005, the Al-Rowwad theater company, based at the Aida Refugee Camp outside Bethlehem, will be coming to the U.S. for a 4-city tour. Al-Rowwad's Founder and Director Dr. "Abed" Abu-srour uses the creative arts, or "a beautiful resistance, " as he puts it, to help children whose lives are shattered by war and occupation -- truly a concrete example of "theaters working against war" happening on the very frontlines of violence.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and supporter of the Benefit, Tony Kushner echoes Abed in maintaining that, "Central to Al-Rowwad's curriculum is the idea that peace and hope must rule the children's lives, and that opposition to oppression must be creative non-violence, a 'beautiful resistance.' " Kushner was joined by fellow playwrights Naomi Wallace, Lisa Schlesinger, Kia Corthron, Robert O'Hara and Betty Shamieh on an extensive visit to the camp in 2002. Al-Rowwad's U.S. tour is a modest but concrete step forward in the process of building peace in the Middle East and overcoming the harmful stereotypes that the conflict has created.

Music Performances *** Readings *** Drinks *** Hors-d'oeuvres*** Silent Auction

Scheduled Benefit performers include: Tony Kushner, Denis O'Hare, NPR's Bob Holman, Henry Chalfant, Anne Waldman, Kia Corthron, Betty Shamieh, Juliana Francis, Matana Roberts, Alan Licht, Mahina Movement, Paul Brill, Maysoon Zayid and Nibras' Leila Buck and Najla Said, Nathalie Handal, Adam Matta, Betsy Andrews, Brian Satz & Jose Joaquin Garcia

Silent Auction items include gift certificates to performances at SoHo Rep; Artwork by Richard Foreman, Vanessa Roe, Heidi, Elbow Toe; Dinners for two at Restauarant Florent, , Aliseo, Read Café, Amorina; Sessions at the Pilates Garage and more.

WHEN: Monday, June 13 at 7:30 pm - Doors open at 7 pm
WHERE: THE CULTURE PROJECT@ 45 Bleecker: 45 Below - the corner of Bleecker and Lafayette
SUBWAYS: 6 to Bleecker; B/D/V/F to Broadway - Lafayette; N/R to 8th Street
ADMISSION: $30 advance reservation; $35 at the door -- Cash and checks, only
Advanced reservations can be made by sending an email to: THAWreservations@yahoo.com Please include your name, contact information and number of tickets requested.
For more information, call 212-615-6964

Can't make the Benefit?
See the panel on the right for Tony Kushner's message on donating! ------->

***STAY POSTED FOR DETAILS ON THAW TALKS LATER THIS MONTH WITH NEVADA SHAKESPEARE COMPANY AND WRECKIO ENSEMBLE THEATER***

Theaters Against War is an international network of theater artists responding to the United States' ongoing "War on Terror," aggressive and unilateral foreign policies, and escalating attacks on civil liberties in the US and throughout the world. THAW is a 2004 OBIE grant recipient.

www.THAWaction.org

THEATER REVIEW

'HOMEBODY/KABUL'

Afghanistan Still Stirs a Housewife

By BEN BRANTLEY, New York Times

Anyone who met the Homebody in the late fall of 2001 has surely been missing her since. It was in December 2001 to be exact – only weeks after the events of 9/11 forever transformed New York's sense of itself – that she was introduced to Manhattan audiences as the title character of Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul."

Older woman: Linda Emond Younger woman: Maggie Gyllenhaal in Tony Kushner's "Homebody/Kabul."

For many of us this graciously awkward woman of flighty, elliptical speech and ineffable convictions offered warming comfort in a world that had taken on a newly aggressive chill.

And now she has returned to New York, in all her certain uncertainty, in the revised and enriched version of Mr. Kushner's play that opened on Tuesday night at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it runs through May 30. Once again she is portrayed by the extraordinary Linda Emond. And as I listened to the monologue delivered by her character, a London housewife who muses on the cruel and beautiful history of Afghanistan, I knew that for once my memory had not exaggerated the enchantment of a performance. And at a moment when the world feels even more unhinged, I again felt stirred, frightened and consoled at the same time.

Though she is onstage for less than a quarter of a play that lasts close to four hours, the Homebody still dominates this ambitious, jagged work by Mr. Kushner. And it may always be the curse and blessing of "Homebody/Kabul" that it begins with Ms. Emond's character's solitary reflections from her cozy, cloistered home in London. Mr. Kushner and Ms. Emond have made the Homebody such a rich and rewarding character that she is a nearly impossible act to follow. But if it's still true that nothing else in "Homebody/Kabul" comes close to achieving the perfection of that opening monologue, the gap has narrowed.

This is partly a matter of subtle script changes. But even more important is the recasting of Priscilla, the Homebody's daughter, who spends most of the play searching in the city of Kabul for the mother who was always a mystery to her. Let it be said, loudly and happily, that Maggie Gyllenhaal, a rising film star in her New York theatrical debut, turns out to be made for the stage, with a throaty, emotion-bending voice and a natural luminosity that makes spotlights unnecessary.

In rewriting Priscilla, Mr. Kushner has softened a character who was originally a relentlessly hostile overgrown adolescent. But it's Ms. Gyllenhaall who locates the awakening wonder in Priscilla, a dawning respect for the ambiguities of life so cherished by the Homebody. The highest compliment that can be paid to Ms. Gyllenhaal is that Priscilla is now unmistakably her mother's daughter.

A more fluid sense of humanity – and especially of the lyricism of individual personalities – pervades this "Homebody." The director Frank Galati and the designers James Schuette (set) and Christopher Akerlind (lighting) have summoned a richness of atmosphere that was lacking in Declan Donnellan's more severe staging. And the cast members have acquired an air of easy acquaintance with their fraught characters.

That said, there remains the feeling that almost everything that follows Ms. Emond's opening monologue is an anticlimax. As the character, clutching an outdated guidebook to Kabul, floats through reveries about an ever-changing, ever-more crowded world of conflicting cultural elements, Mr. Kushner achieves that rich double vision that he can summon better than any other living American playwright. He makes the personal and the universal, the trivial and the cosmic come simultaneously to life in a single character's bewilderment.

When the Homebody leaves the bourgeois comforts of her insulated London existence, the play follows her into a devastated city that has thus far existed only in her imagination. As "Angels in America" also demonstrates, Mr. Kushner's glorious speciality is in giving theatrical life to internal points of view, in which our thoughts meld with a character's wayward speculations or fantasies. Yet the sections of "Homebody" set in Kabul, which are the bulk of the play, are grounded in an in-the-moment naturalism that does justice to neither the unforgiving reality of a war-gutted city under Taliban rule or to the sliding, sometimes phantasmagorical perspectives of the characters.

HOMEBODY/KABUL

NEW YORK (AP) -- The title is tantalizingly topical: "Homebody/Kabul." Yet Tony Kushner's new play, set in 1998 and beyond, was written well before the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It is the culmination of a more than 20-year interest by the playwright in the tragic, tortured history of Afghanistan.

"I started thinking about Afghanistan when I was a student in college," the 45-year-old Kushner said in an interview over breakfast in Greenwich Village. From the Soviet invasion in 1980 to the collapse of the country into chaos following the Russian pullout to the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s, he followed events with more than a casual interest. "When the Taliban appeared, I was horrified by their fundamentalism, their misogyny, their brutality. Afghanistan was a place I read about, thought about -- a place where everything that I assumed or believed in was being challenged," said the avowedly left-wing author, a man who describes himself as a socialist.

"All of my theories, all my sentimental loyalties, certain notions in governance were either sorely tested or overturned by thinking about Afghanistan. For a playwright, that's the kind of stuff you want to look at." Kushner looked more closely in 1997 after his good friend, British actress Kika Markham, asked him to write an hourlong monologue for her. So he read books on Afghanistan, including a 1965 guidebook about Kabul. "I don't usually like one-person shows very much -- I keep waiting for the other people to arrive," the playwright said with a laugh. "But I thought it would be interesting to see if I could write one. The monologue sort of came out of my encounter with that rather magnificent guidebook. "I didn't have any intention of writing a full-length play," he added. "That only came after the monologue was finished, and I heard it performed in front of an audience a few times."

Travels to an unfamiliar land

The longer version came about with encouragement from good friend Jim Nicola. Everything Kushner writes he shows to Nicola, artistic director of off-Broadway's New York Theatre Workshop -- and Nicola was excited by the initial monologue and has supported the work during its long birthing process. Now, four years after Kushner started working on it, "Homebody/Kabul" is in preview performances at the workshop, preparing for a December 19 opening. The story concerns a middle-aged English woman, the "Homebody" of the title, who travels to Afghanistan in 1998 and mysteriously disappears. Her husband and daughter, an angry young woman, go to Afghanistan to find her.

The first act is basically the original monologue by the woman, played now by Linda Emond, as she talks to the audience, reads from a guidebook and exhaustively recounts in detail the history of that troubled land. "This woman is not only deliberately withholding information about herself, she is also erasing herself," the playwright explained. "But I then came to believe that she was planning something -- that she was planning to make up her mind about going to Afghanistan, which is where the rest of the play comes from."

The work just grew and grew and grew. But then Kushner is an expansive playwright. "Angels in America," his Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about AIDS in the 1980s, was performed in two parts and ran more than seven hours. At its first reading a year ago, "Homebody/Kabul" came in at nearly five hours. "At that point, I felt it was pretty spectacular and powerful," said Nicola. "You could see the shape of the play and exactly what he was trying to say. It felt to me that it wasn't that far away from being complete."

At NYTW, audiences will see a much shorter, yet still lengthy piece: a three-hour play, done in three acts. "It's a wonderful piece of writing," said its director, Declan Donnellan, man who also directed the British production of "Angels in America." "I very much like plays that have epic themes, and this is a play very much about loss and violence. Tony has an astringent, tough yet warm humanity. "The wonderful thing about Tony is that you go on a journey with him through a world that he sees. Yet ... you are never being preached to. He never makes you feel stupid."

'Wait until the artist is ready'

"Homebody/Kabul" has been a special challenge for the tiny yet resourceful New York Theatre Workshop, a small space in the East Village where such notable successes as "Rent" and "Dirty Blonde" were born. "One of the keys to the way the workshop functions is that you don't do work just for the sake of doing it," said Lynn Moffat, the theater's managing director. "You wait until the artist is ready to do it." And be ready to spend money on it. The expenses for "Homebody/Kabul"? A couple of workshop readings. Trips to London for Kushner to work with Donnellan, who was specifically requested by Kushner, to hear how the work sounded with English actors. Two dialect coaches. Six weeks of rehearsals for the American cast instead of the usual four.

"It has been a big stretch for the theater," Moffat said. "Not even on 'Rent' did we ourselves come up with the cash for this kind of development work." "Homebody/Kabul" will cost $550,000, out of the workshop's annual $4 million budget. The ticket price: a stiff $60. Yet even with those prices, the workshop expects to lose about $200,000 on the run, which is now set through January 30, but could go longer, Moffat added.

The play has already generated controversy, even for people who have not seen it. A $60,000 federal grant for a separate production, this one next April at Berkeley Rep in California, has been held up pending review by the National Endowment for the Arts. NEA officials have declined to discuss the reasons for the holdup, and Kushner said he would not comment until he was informed of the reasons himself. Besides Berkeley, there will be a third production next spring at Trinity Rep in Providence, Rhode Island. Donnellan also plans a London production at the Old Vic.

Kushner has plenty to keep him busy in the new year. Mike Nichols will begin filming a six-hour version of "Angels in America" for HBO with an all-star cast reportedly headed by Al Pacino as Roy Cohn, Meryl Streep as the Mormon mother of a gay man and Emma Thompson as the epic drama's ubiquitous angel. Kushner, who originally trained as a director, will make his New York directorial debut in late February. That's when "Helen," a comedy about Helen of Troy, written by Ellen McLaughlin, who was the original angel in "Angels in America," begins performances at the Public Theater.

And he is also writing the book and lyrics for "Caroline or Change," a new musical, set in Louisiana in 1963, that deals with race. Jeanine Tesori wrote the music, and George C. Wolfe will direct for a production next season at the Public. Yet "Homebody/Kabul" will occupy Kushner's time for a while.

"If you are doing a revival of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' or 'Long Day's Journey Into Night,' you know that the play works," said Moffat. "What you don't know is if your production will work. When you do a brand-new play, you don't know if the play works.

"And it's doubly hard with 'Homebody/Kabul,' " she said. "You have to make sure that the context for how this play is viewed the first time out is not tainted by news and political events, events that are changing on a daily basis."

The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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