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Homebody/Kabul
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.
172 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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623 people want to read
About the author
Tony Kushner
97 books474 followersTony Kushner is an award-winning American playwright most famous for his play Angels in America, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He is also co-author, along with Eric Roth, of the screenplay of the 2005 film Munich, which was directed by Steven Spielberg and earned Kushner (along with Roth) an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
September 30, 2007
I almost didn't get past the first scene. I almost said "This is ridiculous" and put it way. And then I got past it. And oh my God. I can't even begin to describe it. Poignant, might be a good term. Utterly, absurdly human. But there was something about it, not exactly surrealistic, but nighmarish. That, yes, this is Kabul, this is Afghanistan, but this is the Afghanistan of dreams, where horribly amazing things happen. Half known and unknown. And the language, the use of language, absolutely beautiful. Even the Homebody's English. Amazing. Distancing. At once familiar and hauntingly hostile. I would love to have the time to drink it in, absorb it, find every little nuance and delight in its existence.
November 28, 2007
this play is astonishing. the opening monologue is worth alone the play's weight in gold. the development of the story is mind-blowing, moving, and pleasantly mystifying: a brilliant commentary of the State Of The World. i can't wait to teach it.
March 9, 2020
21. A novel by a famous author, other than the one(s) they are best known for: Homebody/Kabul by Tony Kushner
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List Progress: 9/30
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika, are towering classics of modern theater for a reason. Premiering in 1991, this fantastical and dense saga about the AIDS epidemic was written with the emotion and rawness of someone living in the middle of it. Angels in America uses the individual lives and dramas of specific men and women to tell sweeping, sometimes-cosmic stories about hope, love, humanity, and faith. The pair of three-hour plays can seem dense and unapproachable, but they never lose the connection to real characters that keep the audience engaged.
The 1998 play Homebody/Kabul could only be written by someone like Tony Kushner. Not only because of the rich, dense language it uses…but because only someone with the success of Angels in America behind him would be able to get away with something like this without an editor reining them in.
The play Homebody/Kabul starts off with a 21 page monologue. A British woman, entranced by an outdated travel guide to the city of Kabul, speaks about her dissatisfactions, how she has come to dream of “exotic” places like Afghanistan, and how her own life feels thin and ephemeral through a haze of petty squabbles and antidepressants. She is only known as Homebody and she speaks like she has eaten a thesaurus, but it is an engaging start.
In the second half, her husband Milton and adult daughter Priscilla are actually in Kabul, but to pick up her body. Wandering around Kabul without a burqa in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and right after an American bombing, she is literally torn apart, and her death is seen as an elaborate suicide rather than an accident…Unless she’s not really dead at all, but has converted to Islam and married a Muslim man in secret. Milton and Priscilla are left to hack through the tangled web Homebody has left behind, a morass of personal, historical, and globally political cross-purposes. That is interesting in some ways, but Kushner loses the personal far too quickly. Each character, especially many of the Afghani characters, feel like they have one trait and one trait only. Perhaps a strong cast could bring life and grounding into the work, but as written, it feels more like an aesop.
Seeing it instead of reading it would also present its own challenges, as large chunks of the script are spoken in Pastun, Dari and French. Translations are presented in side-notes, but do not appear to be intended for performance. There is something to be said for making American audiences listen to other languages and feel like they are being othered, and I reserve full judgement as I don’t know how it would come across in performance. But taking figures that already feel thin, and then leaving them untranslated, is a lot of distance to put between the audience and the characters.
Homebody/Kabul is bold and experimental and I’m glad that Kushner was still pushing boundaries after the success of Angels. But it is the nature of experiments to sometimes fail, and I think this one stumbles where other works of his have soared.
Would I Recommend It: No.
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List Progress: 9/30
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika, are towering classics of modern theater for a reason. Premiering in 1991, this fantastical and dense saga about the AIDS epidemic was written with the emotion and rawness of someone living in the middle of it. Angels in America uses the individual lives and dramas of specific men and women to tell sweeping, sometimes-cosmic stories about hope, love, humanity, and faith. The pair of three-hour plays can seem dense and unapproachable, but they never lose the connection to real characters that keep the audience engaged.
The 1998 play Homebody/Kabul could only be written by someone like Tony Kushner. Not only because of the rich, dense language it uses…but because only someone with the success of Angels in America behind him would be able to get away with something like this without an editor reining them in.
The play Homebody/Kabul starts off with a 21 page monologue. A British woman, entranced by an outdated travel guide to the city of Kabul, speaks about her dissatisfactions, how she has come to dream of “exotic” places like Afghanistan, and how her own life feels thin and ephemeral through a haze of petty squabbles and antidepressants. She is only known as Homebody and she speaks like she has eaten a thesaurus, but it is an engaging start.
In the second half, her husband Milton and adult daughter Priscilla are actually in Kabul, but to pick up her body. Wandering around Kabul without a burqa in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and right after an American bombing, she is literally torn apart, and her death is seen as an elaborate suicide rather than an accident…Unless she’s not really dead at all, but has converted to Islam and married a Muslim man in secret. Milton and Priscilla are left to hack through the tangled web Homebody has left behind, a morass of personal, historical, and globally political cross-purposes. That is interesting in some ways, but Kushner loses the personal far too quickly. Each character, especially many of the Afghani characters, feel like they have one trait and one trait only. Perhaps a strong cast could bring life and grounding into the work, but as written, it feels more like an aesop.
Seeing it instead of reading it would also present its own challenges, as large chunks of the script are spoken in Pastun, Dari and French. Translations are presented in side-notes, but do not appear to be intended for performance. There is something to be said for making American audiences listen to other languages and feel like they are being othered, and I reserve full judgement as I don’t know how it would come across in performance. But taking figures that already feel thin, and then leaving them untranslated, is a lot of distance to put between the audience and the characters.
Homebody/Kabul is bold and experimental and I’m glad that Kushner was still pushing boundaries after the success of Angels. But it is the nature of experiments to sometimes fail, and I think this one stumbles where other works of his have soared.
Would I Recommend It: No.
June 26, 2008
A woman more in love with her inner, intellectual life (and books) than reality or her own family steals away to Afghanistan. Her husband and daughter, virtual strangers to her emotionally, go in search of her in a land of miscommunication, brutality and death.
There is so much in this play it's hard to know where to start. One of the characters is a poet who unfortunately learned Esperanto so that his words could be understood by everyone. Of course, they are understood by virtually no-one - such a marvelous metaphor for all the misunderstandings and missed opportunies in the world of the play and the world at large.
People are repressed, their emotional lives suppressed because of all these missed connections and arcane laws.
I've read this play before and this time through, I found Priscilla the daughter to be more spoiled, more irritating than the first time. I'm hoping that what's on the page in her case can be overcome by a great actor.
The long opening monologue, something I virtually skimmed over the first reading, is magnificent. The Homebody uses a tangle of verbiage to simultaneously keep the real world at a distance and create her own lush, intricate universe.
There is so much in this play it's hard to know where to start. One of the characters is a poet who unfortunately learned Esperanto so that his words could be understood by everyone. Of course, they are understood by virtually no-one - such a marvelous metaphor for all the misunderstandings and missed opportunies in the world of the play and the world at large.
People are repressed, their emotional lives suppressed because of all these missed connections and arcane laws.
I've read this play before and this time through, I found Priscilla the daughter to be more spoiled, more irritating than the first time. I'm hoping that what's on the page in her case can be overcome by a great actor.
The long opening monologue, something I virtually skimmed over the first reading, is magnificent. The Homebody uses a tangle of verbiage to simultaneously keep the real world at a distance and create her own lush, intricate universe.
April 10, 2018
3 1/2 stars
June 2, 2025
Priscilla Ceiling is a reader with a vivid imagination. Like Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” she has a task ahead — not buying flowers; buying hats for an upcoming party. She is reading about the 2,500-year-old city of Kabul, with a dramatic and changeable history that couldn’t be more different than her placid home.
Things go from there. An outing becomes a discovery of an Afghan emigre she meets; she believes herself suddenly fluent in Pashtun, and so on. Gripping, this first play of Tony Kushner since his “Angela in America” series.,
Things go from there. An outing becomes a discovery of an Afghan emigre she meets; she believes herself suddenly fluent in Pashtun, and so on. Gripping, this first play of Tony Kushner since his “Angela in America” series.,
May 9, 2018
It’s refreshing to see an American writer tackle world problems that are “sensitive” to many and still manage to keep it real. Most playwrights would’ve changed their work if it surrounded an issue as sensitive as 9/11 and the American involvement and responsibility in Afghanistan. Anyway, I won’t get into specifics but this was both educational and refreshing. Please read this and also read the after thought that follows.
Want to read
December 28, 2019I found a different 2016 version of this, "Homebody Kabul: an excerpt", signed by Tony Kushner and published by Inprint, FioCat Press, and CORE Design Studio as a gift for the patrons of the Inprint Poets & Writers Ball 2016 in Houston TX.
December 6, 2022
تونی کوشنر یک خاطره تلخ رو به درد تبدیل میکنه و از درد، به بهترین شکل ممکن، یه درام میسازه و جسورانه برای مخاطبش از یه تجربه شخصی توو مقیاس تئاتری میگه. از مقام یه مولف بینظیر و تئوریسین تئاتر، صمیمی تر میشه و قصه آشنایی رو برامون میگه.
ارزش چهار ستاره رو داره...
ارزش چهار ستاره رو داره...
May 16, 2017
but WHY
February 20, 2018
Got this at Book Off for $1.
August 30, 2018
Read in 2002 while studying abroad
April 2, 2020
around the world/I searched for you/I traveled on when hope was gone/to keep a rendezvous...
March 12, 2021
This will still haunt me when I die and I will never grasp its pitiful scope
May 25, 2021
And geography, a great suffering in the hearts of the people of the Middle East ...
April 21, 2022
i mean at least mahala was saved
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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September 21, 2022A real reckoning. Kushner does thing most writers only dream of. No one is better at balancing the personal and the political.
February 13, 2023
I realize it's bizarre to give this obviously good work of art one star, but I didn't enjoy it!
May 16, 2023
I liked this book a lot I thought it was easy to read and I liked how the author related her stories to now a day topics.
November 22, 2023
Indescribable and a bit incomprehensible, in a delicious Kushnerian sort of way.
September 11, 2024
Had to read this for a class, and I liked a lot of things the author did
January 23, 2025
kushner back at it again and with the worlds longest monologue even! my man never misses
Read
February 24, 2025read for class
September 6, 2025
A searching and elliptical play about home, history, horror and healing, hate and hope, and humanity.
9/10
9/10
October 11, 2008
I've learned more about Afghanistan in the last two years than I was expecting to: The Kite Runner for senior year summer reading, The Places in Between for college freshmen summer reading, and this for my 21st Century American Drama class. I still feel embarrassingly ignorant about it, a point emphasized in this play: not only are many of our assumptions about this country incorrect, but there is so, so much that we don't understand and choose not to.
I thought the messages in this play were interesting: lack of communication between countries in a modern world, misunderstanding of places that, due to globalization, are becoming our neighbors, the need to have answers, the desire to avoid answers. But this is a three-star for me because I wasn't really moved by it; I thought about it in a very passive, analytical way (probably because it was for a class, too; had I read this independently I might have set it down with a shrug and not pondered it much further.) I experienced no notable emotion during or after the reading of this play. Well, one emotion: irritation, in the Homebody's rambling opening monologue. It reminded me of listening to my mother with a wackier vocabulary, just confused and apologetic and prompting serious eye-rolls on my part. Serious props, though, to the actress that can memorize it.
I thought the messages in this play were interesting: lack of communication between countries in a modern world, misunderstanding of places that, due to globalization, are becoming our neighbors, the need to have answers, the desire to avoid answers. But this is a three-star for me because I wasn't really moved by it; I thought about it in a very passive, analytical way (probably because it was for a class, too; had I read this independently I might have set it down with a shrug and not pondered it much further.) I experienced no notable emotion during or after the reading of this play. Well, one emotion: irritation, in the Homebody's rambling opening monologue. It reminded me of listening to my mother with a wackier vocabulary, just confused and apologetic and prompting serious eye-rolls on my part. Serious props, though, to the actress that can memorize it.
Want to read
March 9, 2009I'm watching 'Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner,' and he talks about right after 9/11, he realized - oh goodness, what do I do with my current play? Do I keep everything as it is? Is it ok still to mention Osama Bin Laden? Because he had written this whole thing about the situation in Afghanistan and the problems about to erupt there and Americans level of engagement etc.. *prior* to 9/11. So, some do actually pay attention. The artists..
I adore Kushner, of course I don't -like- all of Angels in America; similar to 'Fisher King', it's not really something I could -like-, but I greatly appreciate them both. And it's cool, he's coming here to Minneapolis to open his next work, pretty awesome.
I adore Kushner, of course I don't -like- all of Angels in America; similar to 'Fisher King', it's not really something I could -like-, but I greatly appreciate them both. And it's cool, he's coming here to Minneapolis to open his next work, pretty awesome.
November 12, 2009
If nothing else, this play is brave. Written just before 9/11 and performed shortly thereafter, Kushner's play looks at sides of Afghanistan that can't be easily simplified into bad guys and good guys and that would not have been very popular in that dark period of generalized recrimination, fear, and hatred. For me, Afghanistan becomes more and more the symbol of crossing and interchange--and the violence that often accompanies these interactions when imprudently pursued. In many ways, I identify with the Homebody, her attraction and its pursuant self-immolation. And that scares me. As usual, Kushner makes me rethink and reposition myself in relation to a world grown a littler bit larger and little bit more complex thanks to his text.
November 27, 2014
Act 1, Scene 1 is an undeniable masterpiece. I am, however, of the (apparently contrarian) opinion that the rest of the play lives up to its opening. According to his own afterword, Kushner made a concerted effort to abridge an apparently much longer draft of the play. He kept the thematic resonances that are this play's chief pleasure, but perhaps at the cost of character depth. In particular Homebody's husband, Milton, is given short shrift, but I'm told Maggie Gyllenhaal, in the role of Priscilla, brought out unexpected nuance to her character. It's one reason theater can be so exciting: the play can live somewhere beyond the page.
October 18, 2016
The measure of attention this play has received is not due to any intrinsic merit but rather to the coincidence of it having been written just before 9/11 and first performed very soon after, when the world's attention was on Afghanistan, which happens to be the setting of the play. Apart from timeliness, "Homebody/Kabul" has little to recommend itself, telling a simple and unpleasant story filled with flat characters. The one exception is the well-developed and thought-provoking character with whom the play begins, but her lengthy introductory monologue makes the play heavily lopsided and bears negligible relation to the rest of the work.
March 22, 2012
I felt that this play was a bit self indulgent and even a little masturbatory. It seemed like Kushner was just showing off his extensive knowledge of intricate language. None of the characters were particularly likable so I wasn't really compelled to find out what happened to them. Perhaps I am just not sophisticated enough to appreciate what Kushner was trying to say; I found this play pretentious, depressing and tedious.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews