Afghan tales.(Homebody/Kabul)

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 truly look like. Kushner has never hesitated to take on the world; as he wrote in an afterword to "Perestroika," the second part of "Angels," "I wanted to attempt something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be accused of straying too close to ambition's ugly twin, pretentiousness." Kushner's seriocomic "Slavs!," which was staged in 1994 at the New York Theatre Workshop -- where "Homebody/ Kabul" is now playing, under the direction of Declan Donnellan -- and is set in Moscow and Siberia in the years before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is subtitled "Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness." And by happiness, it should be clear, Kushner, a self-described socialist, doesn't mean getting a call from a salesperson at Hermes telling you that the forty-five-hundred-dollar Birkin bag you ordered last year has arrived.

"Homebody/Kabul," which Kushner began working on in 1997, continues the playwright's habit of taking on the world, but, paradoxically, it achieves its most powerful effects before it ever leaves home. For the entire first act of the play, the Homebody, a middle-aged Englishwoman in matronly clothes, sits in a chair in her house in London and talks to the audience. "Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3000 B.C.," she says, reading from a book; in the first of her many self-interruptions, she informs us that the book is a guide to Kabul, published in 1965, and this fact is the jumping-off point for a thrilling stream of words and a thrilling performance by Linda Emond, which together hold the audience rapt for an hour. But we do not just sit there, dumbly dazzled: our minds rush to keep up with the Homebody, and our hearts race with more emotions than we can sort through, as she alternately reads from the book and tells her own story.

When the world she lives in becomes overwhelming, she takes refuge in the past, finding comfort and order and magic in superannuated books and old magazines, in "hysterical political treatises written by an advocate of some long since defeated or abandoned or transmuted cause." These she finds "irrelevant and irresistible"; and part of what makes her monologue -- though that is somehow too leaden a word for the darting charged particles that make up the Homebody's speech -- so riveting ...