cultural adventures

Robert and I have four subscriptions to cultural events, and they all converged in the last ten or so days. So we've attended a bunch of concerts and performances recently -- from last Sunday to this past Sunday, we saw Mark Morris (dance), Chieftains (traditional Irish music), Fortinbras (a play at a local theater), and a Boston Symphony Orchestra Chamber recital. All were wonderful.

Perhaps at the Mark Morris performance, we saw an ad for Homebody/Kabul, which was playing in Boston and was about to close. I glanced at the ad, thought "I really want to see that, but we're busy, and we'll be tired, and let's not, and then I can regret it afterwards." But Robert also very much wanted to see it, and we found a way to get to it on closing weekend.

H/K is by Tony Kushner, who also wrote Angels in America. It's in part about Afghanistan, and though it was four years in the making, it premiered just after 9/11. Kushner was convinced that the subject matter would be unfamiliar and probably uninteresting, and of course his timing was so good that people flocked to it. I'll also say that it was three hours long, revised from about four, and that it was riveting and I could have seen more.

The first part, Homebody, is a monologue that lasts more than sixty minutes. At first, it seems like one of those seemingly irrelevant monologues preceding acts in Angels that is actually related to the play but takes some work to figure out. But as it goes on, you realize that it *is* the play, maybe even the whole play. The speaker is an upper-middle class, isolated and abandoned, English woman sitting in her kitchen talking about her life. Simple enough. She's on anti-depressants, as is her husband (who can't stand the sound of her voice, and she talks a lot). Her daughter doesn't have the slightest interest in her. She has friends and family, whom she gathers on occasion, but they can never wait to leave. So she lives in her head. She reads a lot. She's developed a fascination with Afghanistan and dreams of going there.

This part is packed with words, and hard, complicated words, and they come fast and furious. The context switches rapidly, from parties to the outdated guidebook she's reading, to the man who sold her the latest set of party supplies. This actress carried it off in a way I can't imagine many, if any, others doing.

And then, just as you're settling in, thinking this is the play, and what's the point (although there are a lot of points) and does this play have a climax, or is it all cerebral, and is it almost over -- wasn't it supposed to be three hours? -- just at that point, the set magically switches to ... Kabul, where the Homebody has fled.

But the Homebody isn't there. Instead, the first scene is in a hotel room with the aforementioned daughter (behind a screen) and husband (on a bed) hearing how the Homebody was ripped limb to limb when she went walking through the streets without a Burka. From this point, the husband never leaves the hotel room, but the daughter goes out searching the streets, as if she were a mother searching for her lost child. She feels in her heart that her mother is not dead, and yet every time she's close on the trail, her mother seemingly slips from her grasp. In fact, she finds people who tell her exactly what's happened to her mother, but she can never verify it. And as part of her journey, she goes back to the beginning of time to Cain's grave (who, the story goes, founded Kabul), or maybe the end of time -- the place where her mother was last seen.

The husband and daughter eventually return to England, changed and estranged from each other, and not with the Homebody but with someone else entirely. And the do-nothing husband, he who has abandoned his wife, who can't bear to be in Kabul, who has no interest in the world around him, who has rejected his child, performs a heroic act.

The play resounds on so many levels -- historical, psychological, cultural. There's a lot of talk about self and home, about finding one's home. I suspect that the play will be replayed and talked about for many years to come. And I'm so glad we saw it. I hope we'll have the opportunity to see it again.