Homebody/Kabul
The nameless homebody, a sequestered, fortysomething British wife and mother whose life consists almost entirely of reading books, is charming, self-effacing, and so lonely in her incommunicative marriage that, given a receptive audience, she chatters on and on. Director Frank Galati places Morton far downstage in a comfy chair, a sampling of her copious library stacked gracefully around her. With her precious books at her fingertips, she’s the picture of domestic tranquility, although the enormous black void that surrounds her suggests something more ominous.
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As Morton makes clear from the moment she appears, she’s plagued by some mental itch she can’t scratch. Her current reading material is a sorely outdated but exhaustively researched guidebook to Kabul. She’s enamored of the ancient city for its seemingly limitless capacity to appeal to artists, philosophers, rulers, and historians despite centuries of invasion, conquest, and brutality. The magical spot has long been home to the perpetually displaced, and the homebody knows the pain of displacement all too well–her taciturn husband and disdainful daughter have pulled her family life out from under her.
Thanks to Kushner’s unsparing writing and the cast’s blistering performances, cliched C-SPAN images of forlorn or raving Afghans become atrociously human. To suggest, as the Sun-Times did, that Kushner’s portrait is dated because the Taliban is no longer in power seems a willful refusal to confront one of the play’s central truths: Afghanistan has been torn apart by various occupying powers since its creation, and the misery continues to accumulate.
