Playwright: Tony Kushner
At: Steppenwolf Theatre mainstage,
1650 N. Halsted St.
Phone: (312) 335-1650; $35-$50
Runs through: Aug. 31
Homebody/Kabul should really be longer—a television miniseries, perhaps, or a novel. But even as a play currently running three hours and 30 minutes at Steppenwolf, Tony Kushner’s abbreviated explication of conflicting cultures accomplishes what it accomplishes with remarkable efficiency.
The play opens with a long monologue introducing the titular Homebody—a London matron exhibiting the arcane vocabulary and rambling discourse of the solitary bibliophile. We learn that, based on a 33-year-old tourist guide and a superficial encounter with an Afghan shopkeeper, she has fallen in love with the ancient city of Kabul. We also form an assessment of her personality—important, because the next scene takes us to that ravaged metropolis, where her family has come to fetch her home again. But has she been murdered by thugs, as the officials claim? Or has she eloped with a local citizen? Milton, her bereaved husband, proceeds to get high with a dissipated countryman absurdly named Quango Twistleton. But Priscilla, her daughter, stubbornly searches for her mother, aided by strangers sympathetic to her plight—maybe.
Surrounded by painful contradictions, unsure of whom to trust, seeing no way out of the confusion, people often cling to whatever offers the promise of stability. Thus do Milton, Priscilla, Quango—and Khwaja, the Esperanto poet, and Zai, his Sinatra-fan chum, who befriend Priscilla—find themselves employing increasingly desperate tactics in pursuit of their goals. We share their desperation, too, so that when Kushner makes his point—that the atrocities associated with government in the Middle East are themselves a response to that same despair—our shock is that of just such naive homebodies as they are.
The play’s focus is not its characters, then, but the complex ideas they convey—a task requiring fluency in several languages (French, Dari, Pharsee) and sub-languages (Technospeak, Hellenomania), making dialect coach Linda Gates the show’s star more than any one actor. But Amy Morton’s relish of Homebody’s polysyllabic words, Elizabeth Ledo’s laconiic conviction as the intense Priscilla and Diana Simonzadeh’s delicate individualization of a potentially propagandistic would-be émigré—along with Firdous Bamji and Omar Metwally’s droll but never buffoonish Khwaja and Zai, and a cast of likewise muscular players, all deftly orchestrated by Frank Galati—convey them with emotional candor and intellectual precision.