Homebody/Kabul: Margaret and I saw a dress rehearsal for Tony Kirshner's most recent play at Berkeley Repetory Theatre a couple weeks ago. It's a gripping, long play, with a lot going for it. The first 75 minutes is a fascinating monologue by the "homebody" which is in many ways more riveting than the far more dramatic action which fills the rest of the 3 hours and 45 minutes.
The East Bay Express said, "set in 1998, [it] rakes both the West's colonial legacy and recent foreign policy over the coals. The seeds of the current conflict are spelled out, way too big to miss, and Kushner, who started the play in 1997 and completed it more than a year ago, shows an eerie gift for prophecy." Certainly there are some eerie lines, like "the Taliban are coming to New York," and lots of stuff that foreshadows last September. Another review from the SF Chronicle, notes, accurately, "More than its prescience, what's remarkable is how well the work plays after the world has changed so radically around it."
A day or so after seeing the play, I didn't think about it much; since then I've found that I think about it more and more. Some of it, especially the British expatriate with the Wodehousian name, seemed kind of cliched at the time, right out of Graham Greene or John Le Carre, but a few weeks later seems more real. All in all, a good play, and if you can sit on your butt for four hours, highly recommended.
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