Synopses & Reviews
Set in Kabul, this play examines current day Afghanistan, its history, its long long-tortured relationship with the West and its current complex political and humanitarian crisis. As the story unfolds the Homebody, a bored, emotionally imprisoned but wildly intellectual English woman, finds refuge and escape in the alternate world Afghanistan, which she exoticizes in her mind's eye with the help of an out-of-date tourist guide book. Her mysterious disappearance prompts an ensuing search by her ineffectual husband and her emotionally detached daughter, who arrive in the foreign land unprepared for the adventures that await them. In their quest for truth and closure the lines between the real and the unreal, the political and the personal, the public and the private, the psychological and the sociological are intentionally blurred and artfully ambiguous. As in his previous work, Kushner's ability to provoke, entertain, reinvent and reconstitute language is nothing short of astonishing; with
Homebody/Kabul, Kushner reaffirms his status as one of the most important and dynamic contemporary dramatists in the world.
Tony Kushner has won the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Angels in America, which will be filmed for HBO by Mike Nichols from a teleplay by the author. His other plays include A Bright Room Called Day and Slavs!, as well as adaptations of The Illusion, The Dybbuk, The Good Person of Szechuan and Stella. He is currently at work on two operas, a new play and a screenplay.
Also available by Tony Kushner
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
PB $11.95 1-55936-061-5 o USA
Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika
PB $11.95 1-55936-073-9 o USA
Angels in America (boxed set)
PB with slipcase $23.95 1-55936-107-7 o USA
A Bright Room Called Day
PB $13.95 1-55936-078-X o USA
Death &Taxes: Hydriotaphia &Other Plays
PB $16.95 1-55936-156-5 o USA
Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness
PB $13.95 1-55936-100-X o USA
Review
"Kushner's first big work on a great big canvas since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America. This eerily timed work about Afghanistan is comparably mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive, and scarily well informed." Linda Winer, Newsday
Review
"Kushner, a writer who is always on high alert to humanity as well as history, has, in the Homebody, created a character an 'impassioned, fluttery, doomed' character who is timeless as well as timely." Nancy Franklin, The New Yorker
Review
"Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul is the most remarkable play in a decade...without a doubt the most important of our time." John Heilpern, New York Observer
Review
"What a feast of a play. No playwright in the English language has a greater passion for language than Kushner. And to this Kushner adds that rare quality in American theater, a yearning to go beyond domestic stories and into the great world of political struggle. Brilliant. It keeps us thinking." Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune
Review
"This compelling [play] testifies that Mr. Kushner can still deliver his sterling brand of goods: a fusion of politics, poetry, and boundless empathy transformed through language into passionate, juicy theater...a reminder of how essential and heartening Mr. Kushner's voice remains." Ben Brantley, New York Times
Review
"Dazzlingly eloquent." Charles Isherwood, Variety
Review
"The issues of Homebody/Kabul may be complex and irresolvable, but the dramatic mission is not. It's as simple as Brecht's response to an interviewer who once asked him what theater should do: 'Try to discover the best way for people to live together,' he said. How many dramatists other than Tony Kushner would know how to begin to do that?" Elizabeth Pochoda, The Nation
Review
"Brilliant....[T]his is a play for those who are interested in the root causes that preceded September 11, for those who can see through the fog of patriotism to the finer distinctions, who are finally ready to ask how on earth do we get out of this godforsaken place, who can bear to contemplate the thought that we have participated to some extent in our own tragedy." James Reston, Jr., American Theatre
Review
"Homebody/Kabul...is challenging, truthful, heroically humane. As he did in Angels in America, Kushner vivifies a theater of insight, at once precise and transcendent." Adam Feldman, Broadway.com
Synopsis
Set in Kabul, this play examines current day Afghanistan, its history, its long tortured relationship with the West, and its current political and humantarian crisis. The play centers around the disappearance of an eccentric British woman (the Homebody) and the search for her by her husband and daughter. In their quest for the truth and closure, the lines between real and unreal, the political and the personal are intentionally blurred and are fully ambiguous.
About the Author
Tony Kushner is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Angels in America. His work also includes A Bright Room Called Day, The Illusion, Slavs, and A Dybbuk.