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By Marc Peyser
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Tony Kushner was in Ireland on September 11, and by the time he got to New York his answering machine was filled with messages. "Are you going to cancel the play?" "You're not going to do the play now, right?" Talk about a lousy welcome home. Still, it was a fair question. Stephen Sondheim called off a revival of his murderous musical "Assassins" after the terrorist attacks. Hollywood delayed several menacing TV shows and movies. Certainly Kushner wouldn't dare go ahead with "Homebody/Kabul," a play set in Afghanistan that features a Taliban mullah, women in burqas and at least one reference to Osama bin Laden. Or would he? "I started to think, 'Is there something I'm missing here? Is there something I'm being insensitive about?' " says Kushner, who won a 1993 Pulitzer Prize for skewering Republicans, Mormons, Ronald Reagan and other sacred cows in his AIDS drama, "Angels in America." "I couldn't see any reason to think about canceling."
And so "Homebody/Kabul" opens at the New York Theatre Workshop next week as the play of the moment--literally. Some people still don't love the idea. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts took the unusual step of delaying a final decision on a $60,000 grant for which the play had been recommended, due to its potential to stir up controversy. Ironically, Kushner--a diehard socialist who's been interested in Afghanistan since the Soviets invaded--started working on "Homebody" long before Americans had ever heard of Al Qaeda. The play is set in 1998, and it centers on a family's search for a middle-aged British woman who disappears in Afghanistan after she falls in love with a Muslim. As always with Kushner, the personal quickly becomes intertwined with the political, which is how you get characters from various tribes marching across the stage speaking in Pashto, Dari--even Esperanto. ("I got an Esperanto dictionary, but I'm sure someone will write to me. There are people who still really believe in it," Kushner says.) While "Homebody" is clearly anti-Taliban, Kushner allows his most radical creations to speak their mind in a way that may feel uncomfortable now that any criticism of America is deemed unpatriotic. Kushner is fully aware of the risky nature of what he's written, though he doesn't worry about it. "You're not going to see a four-hour play about Afghanistan because you're looking for an easy night," he says. "I count on an audience really wanting to ask a lot of questions and be asked to do a certain amount of thinking."
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What Kushner did not count on was that the world would change so radically just weeks before his show opened. The timing has been both a blessing and a curse. "People used to say, 'What's the name of the play?' and when I'd say 'Homebody/ Kabul,' people would think I meant 'cobble'," he says. "Now everybody knows exactly what I'm talking about." Sometimes they know too much. The most unsettling scene of the play is undoubtedly the one where several Afghans are angrily explaining to the British family why they hate the West. At one point an Afghan woman reminds us that the United States once funded the Taliban by saying, "You love the Taliban so much, bring them [to] New York! Well, don't worry, they're coming to New York!" Kushner says that line used to get grim chuckles. "All I was doing when I wrote that, eight or nine months ago, was reminding everybody that they'd been here. They blew up the basement of the World Trade Center in 1993." Yet Kushner says he never considered changing the play to fit post-September 11 sensibilities. "People are going to have whatever reaction they're going to have," he says. "It will be interesting to see what everybody makes of it."
Audiences expect to get hot and bothered by a Kushner play. When "Angels in America" landed here, none other than The New York Times said, "Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both." It was all enormously flattering, even if Kushner has lost his official Pulitzer paperweight. But he realizes now that all the "noise" surrounding "Angels" distracted him from working. Not that he didn't get offers, including one to do a rewrite of the "Flintstones" movie. "I said to them, 'I can't. But can I just ask you: why?' " In any event, he's making up for lost time. In addition to "Homebody," Kushner is writing a children's book with Maurice Sendak, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori, a movie for producer Scott Rudin and the screenplay for HBO's six-hour "Angels" mini-series, starring Meryl Streep, Al Pacino and Emma Thompson. He's also become something of an Afghanistan expert, even though he's never visited the place. "I know a lot more about the situation than a lot of the people I hear on talk shows, which is not always reassuring because some of them are generals," Kushner says. Still, he ducks most requests to opine on the war. "I don't want the play to be seen as a footnote to some essay I'd written," he says. Kushner hopes that one day "Homebody/Kabul" will even make it to the land that inspired it. "They've already opened the movie theaters, so how long can it be before a theater opens," he says. "Who knows? Part of it is already translated."
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