HOMEBODY/KABUL
A play by TONY KUSHNER

The play officially opens Dec. 19th and runs until Feb 10th.

CAST: Dylan Baker, Firdous Bamji, Yusef Bulos, Bill Camp, Jay Charan, Linda Emond, Kelly Hutchinson, Dariush Kashani, Sean T. Krishnan, Yousef Kamal, Rita Wolf

DIRECTOR: Declan Donnellan

PRODUCER: New York Theatre Workshop

PRESS AGENT: Richard Kornberg & Associates

NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP
79 East 4th Street New York, NY 10003
(Between 2nd Avenue and Bowery)

From the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Angels in America", comes one of this season's most highly-anticipated new plays: HOMEBODY/KABUL. Falling under the spell of an antique travel guide's fantastic and tragic history of Afghanistan, a woman, a lonely, troubled and over-medicated British wife and mother - mysteriously disappears. Tracking her last known whereabouts to the tortured city of Kabul, what follows is a daughter's desperate search and family's final reckoning. Set in London and Afghanistan at the close of the 20th century, HOMEBODY/KABUL depicts the ultimate inability of one culture to truly see and comprehend another.

3 hours with 2-10 minute intermissions.

Tickets are selling out fast. For tickets: call 800) 421-7250 or go to http://www.telecharge.com/

 

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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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