His Very Own Scoop

As far away as Afghanistan lies in miles from this country, so too it has been from the minds of most people--until this autumn’s events flipped our focus. But long before the headlines screamed of Al Qaeda, repressive mullahs and exotic places like Tora Bora, playwright Tony Kushner had developed an intense interest in the ancient central Asian land.

The result of that fascination is his new play, “Homebody/Kabul,” arriving on the theater scene with great fanfare at a moment when its subject could have been inspired by daily occurrences.

Note that “could” is the operative word here. For as astonishing as it seems, Kushner had finished his play--his first full-length work since the politically charged epic “Angels in America” in the early ‘90s--long before there was widespread awareness in the U.S. of the Taliban. That “they’re coming to New York” is an ominous prediction by a Muslim character in the play.

“It was an effort even to find photographs of Afghanistan,” Declan Donnellan recalls of the period many months ago when he first agreed to direct “Homebody,” most of which takes place in Kabul in 1998. “We collected these scraps of information. Now, of course, we’re overwhelmed” with data. “Homebody” is in previews and opens Wednesday at off-Broadway’s New York Theatre Workshop.

And Kushner, a survivor of the white-hot glare of attention generated by “Angels” (which won a Pulitzer Prize as well as best play Tonys for each of its two parts), is in the unusual position of seeming to be a psychic as well as a savvy, politically motivated, leftist, gay writer of Jewish heritage.

“It’s a mixed blessing to have written a play about a country with which one’s own country has gone to war at the moment it opens,” he says on a day when news is heralding the imminent collapse of the Taliban forces, something “I could never have imagined--that they’d be gone by the time the play opened.”

Psychic he most certainly is not, says Kushner, sitting beneath the skylight of his small Union Square office that is lined, floor to ceiling, with bulging bookshelves. “I think it’s significant that all this stuff was available for someone interested in doing research about Afghanistan,” he says of the information he mined for “Homebody,” much of it things we now read about every day.

The 45-year-old playwright explains his motivation: “When I was a younger person in the ‘80s, wrestling with the fact that I found a great deal of value in the theories of socialism and having been a student--not a supporter--of the Soviet Union, I was very disturbed, very repulsed by news accounts of what was happening during the Soviet-Afghanistan war.

“I found this conflict between what I believed to be the human values of socialism and the grotesque consequences of the attempt to apply some version of it to real politics. Plus, it was a time when Reagan was arming the moujahedeen through the CIA, and, always suspicious of almost everything the Reagan administration did [his outrage at the administration’s position on AIDS inspired “Angels”], I suddenly found myself in odd agreement with it.”

A tall, bespectacled, hawk-nosed, now trim figure (he was considerably heavier when “Angels” premiered and keeps a framed cover of the Advocate to remind himself of that time), Kushner is both doggedly focused (the religious right of all faiths gets repeated verbal thrashings) and prone to go off on an occasional tangent. “The everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aspect” to his plays that he makes reference to applies as well to his conversational style.

“It’s an issue of vanity more than anything else--no, vanity isn’t the right word”--that “Homebody/Kabul” has “withstood the unbelievably rapidly changing circumstances.” Nothing has had to be changed.

Using himself as an example, James Nicola, the artistic director of the Theatre Workshop, says, “Reading the play was an education for me; I’d never heard the word ‘burka.’ Now, of course, the audience knows such things, but ultimately it doesn’t matter.”

As he did with “Angels,” Kushner worked on the script for a long time, beginning with a monologue written for an actress friend in London in 1999. The Homebody in the title (currently performed by Linda Emond) is an inquisitive British housewife whose discovery of an outdated tourist guide to Kabul and encounter with an Afghan shopkeeper arouse a longing to visit a land quite literally at the crossroads of history. (Kushner has never visited Afghanistan--”there was no need for me to be in the middle of a war”--but is now “dying to go to Kabul.... I’ve developed a deep affection for it.”)

That original portion, now the opening of a work that runs more than 31/2 hours, was what Nicola first read and agreed to produce on this side of the Atlantic. “But right away, Tony said that Afghanistan was a very complicated place and he wasn’t sure he’d written all he wanted to say,” Nicola recalls. “He said maybe he’d do another half, a solo for a man, perhaps her husband [who goes looking for Homebody after she impetuously runs away to Kabul].

“Then, after a long time, he called and said there’d be more than two characters, maybe four,” Nicola continues. “It turned into 12--and in typical Tony Kushner fashion, the solutions to the problem aren’t the obvious ones and are way better than could be imagined.”

Not everyone may agree: The National Endowment for the Arts has delayed awarding a grant for “Homebody” to be produced by the Berkeley Repertory Company next spring.

“But that’s not about the play,” Nicola says, “but about Berkeley Rep.”

In the years since the huge splash of “Angels,” Kushner has had only a few short theatrical projects produced, including his 1994 one-act play “Slavs,” set in the Soviet Union. But, he says, fully aware of the high stakes, “I haven’t exactly been staring at the wall.” He’s been a prolific essayist and frequently lectures on college campuses. “I like to put my two bits in, to be part of the general fray.” He has worked on various film versions of “Angels,” which has finally “been green-lit for production--something I began to suspect would never happen”--as a star-filled, six-part HBO series. It will be directed by Mike Nichols and is scheduled to air next year.

Ultimately, however, Kushner says he realized that this was a kind of busy work and that he was only postponing the inevitable: writing a new play, a medium in which, he says, “I feel most sure-footed.” “I’ll never do another ‘Angels,’” Kushner says he assumes, “although I never questioned if I could write plays again. I have ideas all the time, and I know if I live long enough, they’ll become plays--like ‘Homebody’ did.”

“Caroline or Change,” a musical he’s written the book and lyrics for, is scheduled to be produced at the Public Theatre next year. He describes the story, about a relationship between a black family and a Jewish family in Louisiana in the ‘60s, as “something that may or may not have happened to me when I was a child.”

As New York-centric as Kushner appears, he was raised in Lake Charles, La. His father, a native, trained at Juilliard and returned to become first clarinetist of the New Orleans Symphony, where he met his wife, a New Yorker with a leftist background, who was the orchestra’s first bassoonist.

“There are a lot of people like them in Lake Charles,” says the son they attempted to steer toward the cello. “I regret now that I don’t play, but I don’t think it would ever have satisfied me.”

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“Homebody/Kabul,” Wednesday through Feb. 10, New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St., New York, (212) 239-6200.

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Blake Green is a staff writer at Newsday, a Tribune company.