Even pre-Sept. 11, Afghanistan was not the kind of place where most Westerners would choose to vacation.
By 1997, the fundamental Muslim Taliban regime ruled over 95 percent of the country. Under the Taliban, Afghan civil liberties and basic rights went out the window. Afghan history and cultural traditions were subjugated and destroyed; art was forbidden for fear that something would be created that might presume to imitate God.
Tony Kushner has never been afraid to do just that in his work. God and his disciples, whether performing his work or questioning his existence, are all legitimate topics for discussion in Kushner's plays. In fact, his work tends to deal with exactly those subjects that the Taliban outlaws so completely - religion, politics, and sex.
His highly-acclaimed "Angels in America," (1991) is subtitled a gay fantasia on national themes. A play about gays and Mormons and angels themselves, it explores how they locate themselves in the United States today.
Kushner's artistic vision has always been inextricably intertwined with the social and political world; his latest venture, "Homebody/Kabul," is no exception, and the Boston Theater Works production of the play is intimate and thought-provoking. Jason Southerland, the director, has created a somewhat paradoxically self-contained picture of a British family who travels to Afghanistan in 1998, and whose world, as a result of the trip, is both torn apart and allowed to heal.
"Homebody/Kabul" opens with a sparkling, verbally brilliant monologue by the homebody herself, a London wife and mother, Nancy "The Homebody" Carroll. The Homebody is middle-aged, tired-looking, a little frumpy, but gracefully articulate.
The Homebody jumps from subject to subject, riffing on depression, the drugs that treat said depression, the books she escapes in, her unhappy marriage, and her angry daughter. She tells us a story about buying fezzes (Afghan hats) for a party. She reads to us from an outdated guide to Afghanistan, published in 1968, worlds away from the play's time and our own.
Though the Homebody's words are quick, she is never entirely comfortable. As she constantly corrects herself for rambling on too long and for speaking so literarily, there is a sense that something has been lost - although neither the Homebody nor the audience is entirely sure what it is.
Despite her ideological uncertainties, the Homebody's reassuring narrative whisks the audience to a place very far away. The bright, light, raised square of the Homebody's London dining room disappears, and we find ourselves on the ground in a dingy Afghan hotel room.
Two Afghan officials describe in gory detail the destruction of a woman's body. The victim's husband sits stunned on the bed and her daughter behind a curtain. The woman, we learn, was the Homebody, and she is dead, beaten after violating the Taliban's laws on restricting women's appearances in public and for listening to a walkman.
The first act of the play ends after the Homebody's daughter, Priscilla, runs out of the hotel room, away from her father and into the streets of Kabul to find her mother, who she believes is still alive. She meets a guide, a poet who speaks Esperanto, who offers to help her find her mother.
The plot that follows the Homebody's monologue is not entirely believable. It seems unlikely that a British family would simply pick up and travel to Afghanistan on a mother's whim, and that a daughter would run into the streets to find her mother's body which is nowhere to be found.
Outside of the family circle there is even more to question - an Afghan librarian inexplicably finds her way into the family in order to travel back to London, and a drug-addicted British official works his way into the family intimately enough to make this all possible. None of this rings exactly true in the literal sense of the word.
Instead, the plot resonates with a kind of poetic truth. While we don't believe exactly that we are in Afghanistan, it begs us to imagine what it would be like if we were. The play asks us to think of what life might look like from under a burkha and what it means to be a family or a country or simply a citizen.
What might life feel like if we let down our defenses enough to recognize the people around us and to listen to what they have to say? If, like in Afghanistan, everything we know and enjoy and feed our souls with was destroyed or suppressed, could we stay put? In such an environment, is there such thing as love?
The audience finds some answer in Kushner's characters. Like the Afghan citizens whose home was so drastically changed by the advent of Taliban rule, something has upset the balance of the Homebody's family. They rely on antidepressants and forced civility to get along with one another, yet they stay together because they are a family and because they love each other.
As Priscilla, the unmoored daughter, expounds, "What else is love but recognition? Love's got nothing to do with happiness. Power has to do with happiness. Love has only to do with home."
