Homebody/Kabul: Final Revised Version - Softcover

Kushner, Tony

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559362391 ISBN 13: 9781559362399

Publisher: Theatre Communications Group, 2005

Synopsis

Mr. Kushner’s glorious specialty is in giving theatrical life to internal points of view, in which our thoughts meld with a character’s wayward speculations or fantasies... He makes the personal and the universal, the trivial and the cosmic come simultaneously to life in a single character’s bewilderment.” Ben Brantley, New York Times

An extraordinary play a deeply felt, expansively ruminative drama.” Paul Taylor, Independent (London)

What a feast of a play. No playwright in the English language has a greater passion for language than Kushner. And to this Kushner adds that rare quality in American theater, a yearning to go beyond domestic stories and into the great world of political struggle. Brilliant. It keeps us thinking.” Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune

This eerily timely work about Afghanistan is comparably mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive and scarily well informed.” Linda Winer, Newsday
In Homebody/Kabul, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures. Written before 9/11, Homebody/Kabul premiered in New York in December 2001 and has had highly successful productions in London, Providence, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. This version incorporates all the playwright's changes and is now the definitive version of the text.
Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

About this title

About the Author

Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

Review

The playwright of ideas compels us to look afresh at tinderbox issues in a feverish search for understanding the near unsavable world of Homebody/Kabul. It’s about desolation and love in land-mined places, private agony and public squalor, fathers and daughters, the Babel of language and lost civilizations, disintegrating, rotting cultures, sordid Western values and furious opposites, murderers and fanatics, opium highs and tranquilized lives lived out in disgust and self-obliteration. It’s about travel in the generous, best sense of the word travel of the exploding, despairing mind and soul. To where? A place where warring people might one day meet, where steps can be relearned and the meaning of words reborn. The voice of yearning within Homebody/Kabul has now become more urgent, as if time were running out in sickness of heart and soul. Name me a better play of our time for our time.” John Heilpern, New York Observer

Tony Kushner’s searching epic of ideas restores lost connections between theater, thinking and current events. Perhaps no one but Kushner could provide such compelling guidance through the devastation of Kabul, in all its blasted complexity.” Adam Feldman, Time Out New York

Of course, we’ve come to expect celestial wordplay and cosmically elevated thoughts from Kushner, author of A Bright Room Called Day, Slavs! and the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning opus Angels in America. We’ve also come to expect plays that aren’t neat and tidy, that force you to engage rather than passively absorb and don’t let you race home in time to catch the eleven o’clock news Few, if any, modern English-language playwrights of ideas can match Kushner’s intellectual sweep, his subtle but razor-edged sense of humor and his gift for peeling back layers of character until we finally see the naked human within. Even fewer can equal his fiery moral passion or sheer gutsiness. With Homebody/Kabul Kushner has dared to walk through a contemporary minefield, a dramatic terra incognita, without the benefit of a Baedeker to guide him, and emerged intact on the other side with a powerful story to tell.” Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times

Searing Kushner’s use of language and ideas continues to make us think about the deeper questions a masterful conglomerate of words, ideas, and history.” Mary Houlihan, Chicago Sun-Times

Brilliant this is a play for those who are interested in the root causes that preceded September 11, for those who can see through the fog of patriotism to the finer distinctions, who are finally ready to ask how on earth do we get out of this godforsaken place, who can bear to contemplate the thought that we have participated to some extent in our own tragedy.” James Reston Jr., American Theatre

Kushner, a writer who is always on high alert to humanity as well as history, has, in the Homebody, created a character an impassioned, fluttery, doomed’ character who is timeless as well as timely.” Nancy Franklin, New Yorker

Homebody/Kabul is a welcome payoff for all who’ve been waiting a decade for a worthy follow-up to Kushner’s landmark Angels in America. Kushner’s plunge into the murky whirlpools of Afghan history, culture, and politics is astonishing in its intellectual scope. It is also fierce in its dramatic engagement with complex realities and deeply humane. Kushner has led and provoked our minds as richly as he’s engaged our sympathies.” Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle

Dazzingly written, insightful and timely. The playwright’s generous viewpoint is liberal and progressive. His language is rich, his canvas is vast and his storytelling dynamic.” Michael Sommers, Newark Star-Ledger

Homebody/Kabul is a rich and intelligent piece.” Peter Brook

A richly interesting play most American dramatists look inwards. Tony Kushner has always gazed outwards. And not the least remarkable fact about Homebody/Kabul, written well before the events of last September, is that it attempts to embrace and explain the history, culture and ethos of Afghanistan.” Michael Billington, The Guardian (UK)

About this edition

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1559362391
• ISBN 13: 9781559362399
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 172