World traveler
Kushner's can't top an astounding beginning.

By Brad Rosenstein

Homebody/Kabul

WHO KNEW A year ago that Afghanistan would become such an awfully familiar place? Tony Kushner, for one. But while much has been made of Kushner's "prescience" in writing his latest play, Homebody /Kabul, long before Sept. 11, the play is about much more than the events of the moment. Its range, in typical Kushner fashion, extends across the spectrum of monotheistic history, from the Garden of Eden to the rubble of Kabul in 1998 and beyond. The play, now making its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, is about the cost of disengagement at every level, from the individual to the geopolitical.

The focus begins intimately in the cozy London living room of the Homebody (Michelle Morain), an obsessive reader. She is particularly partial to the literature of the obscure, and her interest has led her to settle in with a quaint but informative 1965 travel guide to Kabul. She revels in the guide's piquant language – in fact, she revels in all language, her diction a series of dazzling verbal arabesques weaving her bibliophilic vocabulary into endless related clauses. She apologizes for this Byzantine chatter, which she interprets as a measure of her dissociation from her comfortable but emotionally frigid life.

The Homebody is deeply estranged from her engineer husband and feels ineffective as a mother to their troubled daughter. Pleasantly pickled by antidepressants and adrift in literary fancies, the Homebody nevertheless bubbles with an infectious love of the world in all its brutality and beauty. Her beguiling mix of a comprehensive lesson in Kabul's history and her own family's tensions, her exotic fantasies and lapses of memory, all woven into a brilliant tapestry of language, are Kushner at his best.

Surprisingly, this armchair traveler decides to go explore the world she has only read about. The action moves to Afghanistan, where the Homebody's husband, Milton (Charles Shaw Robinson), and daughter, Priscilla (Heidi Dippold), in pursuit of her, are told of her violent death in the streets of Kabul. The questions surrounding her murder, including whether it actually occurred, only get more tangled as Priscilla and Milton probe the alien world into which they've been thrust. Along the way they meet an intriguing bunch, from the seemingly benevolent Tajik poet Khwaja (Harsh Nayyar) to a heroin-addicted aid worker with the unlikely name of Quango Twistleton (Bruce McKenzie), all lending new wrinkles to "the fifth worst place on earth."

This three-hour-and-forty-minute evening is absorbing, witty, fierce, and intelligent, but it's hard for Kushner to top the astounding opening monologue. We fall in love with the Homebody in a way we don't with any of the other characters, and although the glow she casts over the rest of the evening is integral to the play's artful construction, her presence is sorely missed. The play seems guided by her ultraliterary sensibility, rife with allusions to writers including Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, P.G. Wodehouse, and Salman Rushdie, as befits this tale of "people of the book." The Homebody's obsession with language becomes the play's currency, a babble of jargon, dialects, and tongues that obscure more than they illuminate.

Like the script, Tony Taccone's direction has its rough spots, but his work here bristles with attentiveness and dynamism. Making strong use of Kate Edmunds's ragged wasteland set and Peter Maradudin's sepulchral lighting, Taccone creates a series of resonant tableaux and sharp moments. Paul Godwin's culturally sensitive score casts a seductive spell, and Lynne Soffer outdoes herself as dialect coach, shepherding an array of English and Afghan accents and bursts of languages from French to Esperanto. On opening night Morain slowly warmed to her tour de force, but when she clicked, the results were glorious. McKenzie was superb as the dissipated but sunny Quango, Nayyar was a sly, charismatic Khwaja, and Jacqueline Antaramian splendidly delivered a multilingual anti-Taliban diatribe and an affecting coda.

In his first major work since Angels in America, Kushner has gone in a refreshingly different direction. There's not a single American in Homebody/Kabul, although you might say the ghosts are everywhere. And despite Kushner's unequivocal stance on America's culpability in Afghanistan, the play dramatizes and embraces paradox, uncertainty, and long-view wisdom in often masterful fashion. The script may still need some cooking time, but like its gathering of believers and nonbelievers around what may or may not be the grave of Cain, Kushner's vision offers the possibility of sanity, peace, and wholeness in a murderous world.

'Homebody/Kabul' runs through June 23. Tues. and Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m. (also Thurs/2, Sat/4, Sat/11, May 16, 25, 30, June 8, 15, and 22, 2 p.m.; no show Fri/3); Wed. and Sun., 7 p.m. (also Sun., 2 p.m.), Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Thrust Stage, 2025 Addison, Berk. $38-$54. (510) 647-2949.