There’s a compelling theory of art that I’ve run across from time to time, hanging around actors, which says that it’s sometimes the most glaringly problematic aspect of a difficult play or scene—the apparent flaw or lapse, the line or element that doesn’t seem to make sense or fit in—that’s actually the key to the whole thing.
I keep thinking of this in connection with Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. Not that there’s anything particularly difficult about the play. It’s not hard to follow or to sit through. On the contrary, it’s thoroughly engrossing, complaints about the nearly four-hour running time notwithstanding. It’s also strangely resonant, and moving enough, intermittently, to send one out feeling catharsed, albeit in a rather quiet way. But the play doesn’t hang together. It absolutely refuses to. You may leave the theater in a thoughtful, deliberative state, pondering what this or that aspect of the script or story is doing in the play or where Kushner may be headed with it (he’s famous for going through numerous drafts), but such talk as the play engenders is bound to be inconclusive.
Two things, chiefly, have absorbed commentators on the play. First is the remarkable prescience that led Kushner to choose Afghanistan as a subject at a time when few outside the CIA were showing sustained interest in that corner of the world. (Kushner began writing Homebody/Kabul in 1998, shortly after Clinton’s strategic bombing of terrorist camps in Afghanistan, and the play is set in the same period.)
More attention has been paid to the play’s lopsidedness. The first act consists of an hour-long monologue spoken by an upper-middle-class Englishwoman (the Homebody of the title). It’s a brilliant monologue, a symphony of digression in which the movements of ancient Asian tribes are juxtaposed with ruminations on language, thought, and a seemingly mundane anecdote about going to buy some hats for a party.
The woman is haunted by Afghanistan, an obsession she projects onto an obsolete guidebook from which she continually reads aloud an ongoing account of the history of that region. She has a “perverse” fondness for antique information (“…I invariably seek out not the source but all that which was dropped by the wayside on the way to the source…”). She’s a fascinating character, at once maddening and enchanting, and her far-flung erudition and idiosyncratic cast of mind would remind us of Kushner’s own—except that she has a disability, a sort of willful, self-conscious logorrhea.
She can neither stop talking nor speak directly to the point of whatever it is she is trying to say. Perhaps she is afraid of silence or in love with words. If the latter, though, it’s not for their own inherent beauty and power. This is something angrier, more narcissistic; more to do with their sound in her mouth and how she can use them to preclude the possibility of connection:
… I live with the world’s mild censure, or would do were it the case that I ever strayed far enough from my modesty, or should I say my essential surfeit of inconsequence, to so far attract the world’s attention as to provoke from it its mild censure; but I have never strayed so far from the unlit to the spotlight, and so should say rather that I live with the world’s utter indifference, which I have always taken to be a form of censure-in-potentia.
It’s not as irksome as it must seem on the page, partly because Kushner and his director, Declan Donnellan, and the actress who delivers the monologue, Linda Emond, all have contrived to make the character and her affectation appear as droll and charming as they are angry and abusive.
I speak…I can’t help myself. Elliptically. Discursively. I’ve read too many books, and that’s not boasting, for I haven’t read many books, but I’ve read too many… So my diction, my syntax, well, it’s so irritating, I apologize, I do, it’s very hard, I know. To listen. I blame it on the books, how else to explain it? My parents don’t speak like this; no one I know does; no one does. It’s an alien influence, and my borders have only ever been broached by books. Sad to say.
Only ever been broached by books. Except once, briefly. Which is I suppose the tale I’m telling, or rather, trying to tell.
The story turns out to be about the proprietor of the shop where she went to buy the hats—an Afghan, she assumes—or her imaginings about him. Taking her receipt, she notices that some of the fingers on his right hand are missing, hacked off. In her fantasy, she asks what happened to his hand and imagines his reply:
“I was with the Mujahideen, and the Russians did this. I was with the Mujahideen, and an enemy faction of Mujahideen did this. I was with the Russians…my name is in the files if they haven’t been destroyed, the names I gave are in the files, there are no more files, I stole bread for my starving family, I stole bread from a starving family, I profaned, betrayed, according to some stricture I erred and they chopped off the fingers of my hand. Look, look at my country, look at my Kabul, my city, what is left of my city? …[O]nly God can save us now, only order can save us now, only God’s Law harsh and strictly administered can save us now…only terror can save us from ruin, only neverending war, save us from terror and neverending war, save my wife they are stoning my wife, they are chasing her with sticks, save my wife save my daughter from punishment by God, save us from God, from war, from exile, from oil exploration, from no oil exploration, from the West, from the children with rifles, carrying stones only children with rifles, carrying stones, can save us now… You will never understand… The people who ruined my hand were right to do so, they were wrong to do so, my hand is most certainly ruined, you will never understand, why are you buying so many hats?”
Kushner has said that the play grew out of a monologue he wrote for an actress friend. Reviewers, noting this, have suggested (while paying homage to the brilliance of the monologue) that the rest of the play seems tacked on. Unquestionably it does.
After Act I, the speaker disappears and we never see her again. Act II takes us to Afghanistan. As it begins, her husband and daughter (Dylan Baker and Kelly Hutchinson) are listening while a Pashtun doctor (Joseph Kamal) reads the grizzly findings of an autopsy in terms so clinical as to be barely intelligible. Having gone suddenly and mysteriously to Kabul (when? why? it is unclear), the woman from Act I is now suddenly and mysteriously dead. The official story being given out is that while walking alone amid the ruins outside of Kabul–unescorted, bare-headed, carrying a symbol of Western luxury (a CD player)–she was set upon and torn to pieces by an anti-Western mob. The whereabouts of her body, however, are unknown. The balance of the play concerns the efforts of the daughter to find out what really happened to her mother.
Little of what follows makes terribly much sense. The husband, Milton, remains cloistered in a hotel room getting drunk and smoking opium with a marooned aid worker (Bill Camp) who proves to be a heroin addict. Priscilla, the daughter, goes around and about Kabul looking for her mother’s body, escorted by a Tajik poet (Yusef Bulos) who writes entirely in Esperanto. From a hat-seller, she receives an implausible message and hears an implausible story: that her mother is not dead at all but has renounced the West and married the Pashtun doctor. He, for his part, has a wife of whom he has tired–Mahala (Rita Wolf), an angry, bitter woman. She wishes to emigrate to England. The message is that Milton and Priscilla should take her back with them. Which is exactly what happens, in spite of numerous scenes in which the plan is rejected as absurd. The play ends with the Pashtun woman sitting in the same chair, by the same book-laden table beside which the Englishwoman sat in Act I.
Michael Feingold, reviewing Homebody/ Kabul in the Voice, was particularly succinct in pointing out the weaknesses in the latter part of the play, which relies, for instance, on the premise “that a woman who is presented to us as highly intelligent, philosophic even, and resolutely committed to deriving her experience from books, would suddenly drop everything and go to the most dangerous country in the world for a woman alone…” It’s a valid point, like the other “contradictions and improbabilities” Feingold cites: that the woman’s husband “…should passively lose interest in knowing what became of her; …that her disappearance should arouse no apparent media interest…; that there should be an elaborate story about the supposed Muslim husband needing to dispose of his first wife, when this is famously not a problem in countries ruled by Islam; and so on down the line.”
I read the whole thing as a dream—the daughter’s possibly, but probably the mother’s. As a play, nothing that Kushner has written makes sense. As a dream, though, it’s perfectly gorgeous—a dream the woman in Act I might tell her daughter about, only she can’t talk to her daughter, can’t talk directly at all.
Not only does it seem accurate to say, as Feingold does, that the woman we meet in Act I would be unlikely simply to pick up and go to Afghanistan. It seems to me that her inherent inability to do anything like that is established as her greatest source of personal sorrow. She designates herself “the homebody.” In a passage of lyrical self-loathing, late in Act I, that focuses (as usual) on the antique book and brings together global, parental and linguistic guilt, she reviles the moral condition of one whose nature it is, like her own, to remain perpetually hors de combat:
I love…this guidebook. Its foxed unfingered pages, forgotten words… Its sorrowing supercessional displacement by all that has since occurred. So lost; and also so familiar. The home away from home. Recognizable: not how vast but how crowded the world is, consequences to everything: the Macedonians, marching east; one tribe displacing another; or one moment in which the heart strays from itself and love is…gone? What after all is a child but the history of all that has befallen her…? What else is love but recognition? Love’s nothing to do with happiness. Power has to do with happiness. Love has only to do with home.
(Little pause)
Where stands the homebody, safe in her kitchen, on her culpable shore, suffering uselessly watching others perishing in the sea, wringing her plump little maternal hands, oh, oh. Never joining the drowning. Her feet, neither rooted nor moving. The ocean is deep and cold and erasing. But how dreadful, really unpardonable, to remain dry.
I think the “flaws” and inconsistencies in the latter part of Kushner’s play are for the most part intentional. I don’t think it’s about Afghanistan at all, really. I think it uses Afghanistan as a metaphor for the inexplicable rage and hatred that all the members of the family in the play seem to feel for each other and that appear to be the only things they share.
In fact, if it’s possible to write a successful play about states of cognition, I have to say I think Kushner has largely done so. Everyone in Kabul is in some peri-normal state—either medicated or mad or accused of being mad. There’s a tremendous air of unreality about all the characters. Even their resemblance to literary archetypes, which has been pointed out, makes them seem like the midnight creations of a too-sophisticated mind. We know little about them and understand less. Chiefly we don’t understand why they hate each other so much.
Where the play lacks clarity is on the subject of language. It seems, at times, obsessed with language: the Homebody’s patterns of speech, the poet who writes in Esperanto, the prevalence of characters who speak in foreign tongues, of which members of an English-speaking audience can be expected to partially understand some and others not, of which some are translated and some not. And there’s the mysterious mathematical language that only Milton, as an architect of information technology, speaks. Everything he says is thematically linked to some other aspect of the play—from his technical explanation of Boolean dualities to a simile likening the virtual way-stations he creates to Afghanistan itself. He says that he simplifies complex, nuanced things. This can’t be a good thing. And yet his talk about language is the most revealing, the most insightful talk in the play.
Is what Milton does with language better or worse than what the Homebody does with it? Is what she does with it good? I find that I honestly don’t know, and I think we need to know. We need to know what Kushner makes of what Milton and the Homebody do with language. Anyway, I know I do.