[NEohioPAL]NYTimes.com Article: Tony Kushner Continues to Tinker With 'Homebody/Kabul'

[Carole Clement]

Tony Kushner Continues to Tinker With 'Homebody/Kabul'

September 9, 2002
By MEL GUSSOW

Some plays are written, others are rewritten. The works of
Tony Kushner belong firmly in the second category. Sitting
in his office in Union Square, a tiny, book-lined room that
is taller than it is wide (with a long ladder leading to
the topmost shelf), he talked in specific detail about how
he nurtures a work through its creative process. After
seeing a play performed, he goes on "tinkering and
tightening and tweaking and trying to get it right." This
was the case with his first great success, "Angels in
America," and it is equally true with "Homebody/Kabul,"
which had its world premiere last December at the New York
Theater Workshop.

This play about Afghanistan in the late 1990's received
admiring reviews, won several prizes and sold out its
limited run off Broadway. Since then it has had three
different productions: in Providence, R.I.; Berkeley,
Calif.; and London. Even though the work has been
published, the playwright is still tweaking the text. By
the time it is presented next season at the Steppenwolf
Theater Company in Chicago, he hopes to get it right, he
said. Then, and only then, might it return to New York.

"I really thought I would churn it out and it would be
perfect," he said. "I always tell myself that with every
play, and of course plays are never like that, or least
mine aren't. They tend to cling and cling and need more and
more attention."

The play had been scheduled to open this month at the Mark
Taper Forum in Los Angeles, but Mr. Kushner said it was
postponed for two reasons. He was still working on
revisions, and he wanted to avoid a synchronicity with the
anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon. He wrote the play before Sept. 11,
and the subsequent changes are artistic rather than
political.

After the original run in New York there have been two
major changes. As the slash in the title indicates, the
play splits into two parts. It opens with an Englishwoman's
nonstop virtuosic monologue about the history, ethnography
and geography of Afghanistan, and then suddenly switches to
Kabul, where the woman's husband and daughter have gone to
solve the mystery of her disappearance. She may or may not
have been murdered in Afghanistan.

As performed in New York by Linda Emond, the monologue was
the entire first act, followed by two other acts in which
the character did not reappear. When that production
closed, Mr. Kushner decided to return to his original idea,
which was to follow the monologue with a second scene that
takes place in Kabul, a scene that had opened the second
act.

Staging the monologue by itself, he said, was a mistake.
The new sequence "started the motor of the play's story and
connected the monologue more powerfully to the rest of the
play, and it took some of the time pressure off the second
and third acts," giving them a better balance.

The other major alteration concerns the daughter and was
made at the suggestion of Oskar Eustis, who directed the
play at Trinity Repertory Theater in Providence. In the New
York production the daughter spends the first half of the
second act believing that her mother is dead and trying to
find her body. Later she has doubts about her mother's
fate. In the revised version the daughter begins with those
doubts.

"She finds her mother's death implausible," Mr. Kushner
said. "She doesn't go out on the streets of Kabul to look
for her mother's body but to find her mother who she
believes is still alive."

Responding to criticism that the daughter was too abrasive,
Mr. Kushner said he tried to make her more sympathetic but
found that the character was resistant. This is, he
realized, a dysfunctional family. The father and daughter
are "immensely unhappy," and there was nothing he could do
about it.

Still, the rewriting continues. It was Mr. Kushner's
surmise that all playwrights did it. When it was suggested
that Samuel Beckett did not rewrite, he said: "Well,
Beckett is like Shakespeare. Johnson says about
Shakespeare, `He scarce blotted a line.' Those people
aren't human. They're from Mars, or something. I blot. My
entire life is about blotting."

Then he added, "Brecht is arguably as great a genius as
Beckett, and he couldn't stop changing and rethinking." As
for Shakespeare, he said, "Directors feel complete freedom
to cut and chop and transpose, so in a sense the human race
is rewriting him all the time."

In Mr. Kushner's case there is something daunting about his
process, especially with his two major works. Even as he is
rewriting the second half of "Homebody/Kabul," he is also
contemplating revisions of "Perestroika," the second half
of "Angels in America," which Mike Nichols is directing as
a six-hour HBO television mini-series.

Reading a biography of Goethe Mr. Kushner discovered that
Goethe believed that some of his plays were
"incommensurable," that they were inevitably
disproportionate, with the two parts of "Faust" being the
classic example, the first part complete, the second part
less satisfying.

"I think all two-part plays follow the `Faust' model," Mr.
Kushner said, naming "Peer Gynt," "Dance of Death" and
"Angels in America." With "Homebody/Kabul" he hopes to
avoid that pitfall.

He is aware of the danger in endless rewriting, he said,
and pointed to Walt Whitman as someone who damaged his own
work: "Every time he put out `Leaves of Grass,' he changed
it. `I celebrate myself' became `I celebrate myself, and
sing myself.' It got weaker and weaker the more he potchked
around with it," he said, summoning up a decidedly
un-Whitmanesque image.

By his own admission, Mr. Kushner is an obsessive
potchkier, someone who makes a fuss, and he can even
question the act of inspiration: "A gush of ideas or words
absolutely has to be reexamined and reread and worked on.
Is it a breaking through of a muse's song, or is it just
noise that you generate to distract your terror?" In his
case, he fears he is going to fail. He said he began every
play with that trepidation.

Having said all that, he acknowledged the "Homebody"
monologue as a burst of intuition. The British actress Kika
Markham had asked him to write a monologue for her. In 1997
he began it in his office and wrote most of it on a night
flight to London. Arriving there he checked into a hotel,
finished writing the piece and then slept the rest of the
day. The next morning he met Ms. Markham and the director
Annie Castledine, and the actress read the monologue aloud.
"Kika was horrified," he remembered. "She didn't know what
the hell she was saying, and I was too tired to know. Annie
loved it." The monologue was rushed into performance,
running for three weeks in London.

"Various friends who saw it said this is a great beginning,
but there's so much more to the situation, and the
character cannot talk about it." At a much more deliberate
pace he wrote "Kabul" to follow "Homebody," and James C.
Niola presented the entire work at the New York Theater
Workshop in a production starring Ms. Emond. (Ms. Markham
later appeared in the full play in London.)

When "Homebody/Kabul" was in rehearsal in New York, Mr.
Kushner considered bringing the Homebody back onstage in a
dream sequence in Kabul. After Ms. Emond read it aloud with
the other actors, she told the author she did not think the
scene should be in the play. He agreed.

Asked if he knew if the character lives or dies, he said:
"I have different feelings on different days. I write in
longhand, and then I type everything into my computer. In
the longhand draft she is dead, and in the version that got
into the computer she seems to be not dead. I honestly
don't know." For the audience the ending remains ambiguous.


On the cover of the published play there is a painting by
Mr. Kushner's sister, Lesley, of a spectral form
representing the head and shoulders of a woman. In his
acknowledgments to the play he says that only he and his
sister and other family members "know best and miss most
the spirit that haunts the painting and the play."

That spirit is Mr. Kushner's mother, a classical musician
who died in 1990. "The Homebody is in some ways a portrait
of my mother," he said. "There's a particular quality of
pride, a virtuosic display and at the same time
mortification that seems always to follow on the heels of
it. There's a kind of narcissistic wrestling going on in
the soul of this woman that I think had a lot to do with my
mother, a very loving person but mercurial. She's a very
difficult person to talk about, which is also what the
daughter finds in the play."

His mother saw "Millennium Approaches," Part 1 of "Angels
in America," in its first production in Los Angeles in
1990, and, he said, "it scared her," partly because of the
closeness to her and her son. In the play the character Joe
Pitt telephones his mother and tells her he is gay, a scene
from Mr. Kushner's own life. Mr. Kushner's father, also a
classical musician, found the work upsetting but
immediately told his son that it was a wonderful play. In
1993 "Millennium Approaches" won the Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Kushner is in the midst of a highly creative phase. In
addition to his work with Mr. Nichols on the film of
"Angels in America" (starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and
Emma Thompson, with Michael Gambon and Simon Callow as
ghosts), he is writing the book and lyrics for a musical,
"Caroline or Change," composed by Jeanine Tesori. The
musical takes place in Lake Charles, La., where Mr. Kushner
grew up. "Even though it's not actually autobiographical,
it's the closest to autobiography of anything I've done."

He is also writing a film about an episode in the life of
Eugene O'Neill, and has been working for many years on
"Henry Box Brown," about slavery. The shelves in his office
are lined with books on the subject. In common with his
other plays, this one will be deeply imbedded in research.

While carefully apportioning his time among all these
projects, he remains focused on the evolution of
"Homebody/Kabul." Suddenly he said: "I have a very radical
idea for a rewrite that will make it a much shorter play.
I'll take out the meat cleaver and clear away the fat. My
suspicion is that it will be a diminishment, but I think
it's worth trying."

Then there is his long-planned journey to Afghanistan.
Nancy Hatch Dupree, who wrote the guidebook that is one of
the sources of "Homebody/Kabul," has encouraged him to do a
theater workshop with playwrights in Kabul. "I'd love to
take her up on it," he said. "But it's a little too
volatile there." This would be his first trip to
Afghanistan. As always, Mr. Kushner remains an intrepid
traveler in his imagination.

Carole Clement       Mentor, Ohio  USA
http://www.nucleus.com/~sdempsey/clement.htm

Waltzing on Flowers  Is death like falling into an abyss . .  or like 
waltzing on flowers?
Staged reading at Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum, Topanga Canyon, 
CA  October 20