Faraway tragedies hit home

The Homebody, a scatterbrained Englishwoman who delivers the opening filibuster in Tony Kushner’s deeply involving new play, “Homebody/Kabul,” is a middle-class twit of the most annoying sort. Narcissistic, emotionally flighty and given to uttering long, nigh-unintelligible strings of $20 words, she’s the archetypal self-absorbed Westerner, an Ugly Anglo American gazing at the world’s tragedies from a safe distance and misguidedly projecting her own silly neuroses and delusions onto the rest of the planet.

Then again, she’s nothing of the kind. She’s a bookish, fiercely intelligent and empathic creature with a passionate grasp of current geopolitical realities, a born do-gooder whose heart cleaves over the sheer beauty of the world as well as over the hideous suffering that her fellow beings inflict on one another.

To put it another way, the Homebody -- as portrayed to dualistic perfection by Linda Emond in the fine new production of Kushner’s play that opened Wednesday at the Mark Taper Forum -- is every bit as painfully divided and profoundly paradoxical as Afghanistan, the country that lies at ground zero of this strikingly timely piece.

Just as thousands of years of invasions and bloody infighting have made the modern Afghan capital of Kabul a tragic symbol of paradise despoiled, a global crossroads ground into dust, fate’s cruel twists have turned the Homebody into an unwitting mouthpiece and stand-in for a wider humanity. If Afghanistan looms in the 21st century imagination as the global-village-as-ghost-town, the Homebody is a kind of one-woman refugee camp -- simultaneously a mother figure and a spiritual orphan. Her agonized and eloquent 52-minute monologue expresses not only devastating personal loss. It also speaks of universal bereavement and dislocation, of the scattering of the human tribe, the fragmentation of language and the alienation of our species from the better angels of our nature.

And that’s only Act 1, Scene 1.

Of course, we’ve come to expect celestial wordplay and cosmically elevated thoughts from Kushner, author of “A Bright Room Called Day,” “Slavs!” and the Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning opus “Angels In America.” We’ve also come to expect plays that aren’t neat and tidy, that force you to engage rather than passively absorb and don’t let you race home in time to catch the 11 o’clock news. This 3 1/2-hour odyssey fits that pattern, and at Wednesday’s performance several playgoers didn’t manage to finish the trip.

But if you can stick with its abrupt tonal swings (most of them gracefully handled by director Frank Galati), its harrowing leaps of imagination and its deliberately disorienting linguistic shifts from English to Dari to French to Esperanto, “Homebody/Kabul” will gradually allow you to get your bearings and transport you far beyond the frontiers of conventional wisdom with regard to our anguished, jittery, mucked-up world.

Setting their internal compasses straight is the main challenge confronting the play’s other principals, particularly the Homebody’s husband, Milton (Reed Birney), and daughter, Priscilla (Maggie Gyllenhaal). After the Homebody’s marathon soliloquy in a London sitting room, the play whisks us to a dingy Kabul hotel room where Milton and Priscilla are being briefed by a garrulous doctor and a stern Taliban minister. It seems that the Homebody, in a perturbed, drug-addled mental state after a series of family spats, had fled to the war-torn country’s rubble-strewn capital, where she has vanished amid official reports that she was set upon and torn to pieces by a mob. The remainder of “Homebody/Kabul” deals with her guilty, grief-stricken family’s attempt to track down her remains or determine her true fate, however improbable.

Though skillfully elaborated, the mystery of the Homebody’s disappearance is only one of the philosophical and dramatic engines that drive the play’s action. Written during the false lull of the late Clinton era and before the carnage of Sept. 11, “Homebody/Kabul” is not a Costa-Gavras political thriller but, in true Kushner fashion, a multiple character study of ordinary people trying to navigate the political, psychological and metaphysical headwaters that are threatening to drag them under.

Milton initially chooses the path of emotional least resistance: resignation and despair, mitigated by a couple of opium- and heroin-induced flights of fancy. His companion in wistful debauchery is a shady British aide worker who might have stepped out of an E.M. Forster or Graham Greene novel, with the P.G. Wodehouse-esque name of Quango Twistleton, played by Bill Camp with a perfect combination of cynicism, pathos, doomed romanticism and self-hatred. Birney’s performance gets everything right (accent, inflections, body language) about this tweedy, unhappily married computer specialist, who sees in his outwardly steely slacker-daughter the disturbing mirror image of his missing wife.

But the play and the production both pivot on the quest that Priscilla, angry and disbelieving, undergoes to try to find out what really happened to her mum. Enlisting the services of a genial guide-for-hire and poet named Khwaja (Firdous Bamji), who saves her from a Taliban policeman’s beating, she roams Kabul searching for information, her jeans and sneakers ludicrously visible beneath a tangled green burka. Registering Priscilla’s conflicting sensations of sadness and a bizarre exhilaration, Gyllenhaal taps those qualities of innocence and suppressed intelligence warring with inner demons that have served her so well in feature films like last year’s “Secretary.” It’s a great, multi-valent performance.

Eventually, Priscilla’s wanderings take her to the scene of the alleged crime, a mythical spot in Kabul where Cain, the Old Testament father of all murderers, is supposedly buried. But first she must grapple with a potentially life-threatening proposal, in the person of an equally tormented Afghan woman (Rita Wolf) who’s seeking to escape from the Taliban’s misogynistic theocracy. Delivering a French-accented rant in three languages, Wolf creates a blazing impression and, in that moment, practically steals the show. Aasif Mandvi also is excellent as the courtly but implacable Taliban minister.

Set designer James Schuette has framed “Homebody/Kabul” in a very naturalistic-looking shell of ruined brick buildings, bisected by a low wall that swings to and fro on a turntable -- an apt metaphor for the characters’ emotional partitioning. I do wish that Galati and his design team had come up with something less obvious than drums and ecstatic chants to punctuate scene changes.

Some critics have faulted “Homebody/Kabul” for what they feel is its meandering failure to take shape after the condensed urgency of the Homebody’s opening salvo. (Kushner initially wrote the play as a one-act monologue, then expanded it.) It’s certainly true that most of the important action takes place in the characters’ minds and souls; when a soldier points a rifle at a terrified woman’s head a few minutes from the final blackout, you may find yourself bolting upright in your seat. The mechanics of stagecraft are still not Kushner’s strong suit, and those who come to his plays expecting to find meticulously crafted little intellectual jewel boxes, like the works of Michael Frayn, for example, are likely to be disappointed.

But few, if any, modern English-language playwrights of ideas can match Kushner’s intellectual sweep, his subtle but razor-edged sense of humor and his gift for peeling back layers of character until we finally see the naked human within. Even fewer can equal his fiery moral passion or sheer gutsiness. With “Homebody/Kabul” Kushner has dared to walk through a contemporary minefield, a dramatic terra incognita, without the benefit of a Baedeker to guide him, and emerged intact on the other side with a powerful story to tell.

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Homebody/Kabul

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 1 p.m., except Nov. 5, 1 and 7 p.m.; Nov. 9, 1 p.m. only.

Ends: Nov. 9

Price: $33-$47

Contact: (213) 680-4017

Running Time: 3 hours, 30 minutes

Linda Emond...The Homebody

Maz Jobrani...Dr. Qari Shah

Aasif Mandvi...Mullah Ali Aftar Durranni

Reed Birney...Milton Ceiling

Bill Camp...Quango Twistleton

Maggie Gyllenhaal...Priscilla Ceiling

Rahul Gupta...A Munkrat/Border Guard

Firdous Bamji...Khwaja Aziz Mondanabosh

Dariush Kashani...Zai Garshi

Rita Wolf...Woman in burka/Mahala

Presented by Center Theatre Group/Music Center of Los Angeles County in association with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Written by Tony Kushner. Directed by Frank Galati. Scenery James Schuette. Costumes Mara Blumenfeld. Lights Christopher Akerlind. Original composition and sound design Joe Cerqua. Production stage manager James T. McDermott.