Afghan tales.(Homebody/Kabul)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-JAN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

That Tony Kushner's new play, "Homebody/Kabul," which is set in London and Kabul and takes place mostly in 1998, shortly before and shortly after the United States bombed terrorist camps in Afghanistan in response to the two embassy bombings in Africa, happens to be preoccupied with matters that are currently preoccupying everyone in this country, and in much of the world, is astonishing, but, given Kushner's essentially political nature and his concomitant interest in history -- his insistence on history, really -- it should not be altogether surprising. The central character of the play, a nameless woman called the Homebody, says, "We shudder to recall the times through which we have lived, the Recent Past, about which no one wants to think." It is the recent past that Kushner has dared to dramatize in this play, as he did, nearly ten years ago, in the two-part masterwork "Angels in America," which gave the lie to Reagan's hollow claim that "it's morning in America" and then created a vision of what a new dawn might...

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