For Tony Kushner, an Eerily Prescient Return
By PETER MARKS
LONG before Kandahar and Jalalabad became household words, before CNN began familiarizing viewers with the hostilities between Pashtuns and Tajiks, before Al Jazeera was reporting nightly on military sorties over the Hindu Kush, the American playwright Tony Kushner had developed an obsession with Afghanistan. And it was a fascination that inspired what is likely to be his most talked-about play in a decade.
Though he had never been to the ravaged country, he was drawn to its geopolitical plight. "I'd always been moved and disturbed both because of what the Soviet Union did there," he said, referring to the 1980 invasion that set off a brutal proxy war. "And then there was the American complicity in arming the mujahedeen and leading to a decade of slaughter."...
"Homebody / Kabul," a three-hour-plus, 12-character drama that Mr. Kushner completed last winter and that is now in rehearsal at New York Theater Workshop in the East Village, reads at times as if it had been written in response to Sept. 11, not in advance of it.
The parallels to current events - the play takes place in 1998-2000 - were so uncanny that after the terrorist attacks, some cast members thought Mr. Kushner should cut several lines, for fear that audiences would think he was taking advantage of the tragedy. At one point, for instance, an Afghan character, an educated woman who suffers greatly under the Taliban, complains bitterly about how the United States bears responsibility for bringing the ruthless regime to power. "Well don't worry," she observes, "they're coming to New York!"
The statement is chilling in its prescience. "It used to be this grim laugh line," Mr. Kushner said during a long conversation in his Union Square office on the very day that television news was reporting the Taliban had abandoned Kabul. "I've actually considered putting an author's note about it in the play." A reference in the drama to a massacre of 2,000 Taliban prisoners worried him, too: would the play be wrongly characterized as sympathetic to the Taliban?
That reference stayed in, too. "I thought, `Don't lie about history to make yourself feel safe,' " he said.... <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/25/arts/theater/25MARK.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>