[REVIEW] Homebody/Kabul

[rfmcdonald]

The problem with the Toronto performance of Tony Kushner's play Homebody/Kabul lay not with the more-than-competent actors (Fiona Reid, portraying a confused and depressed middle-aged British woman on the verge of something radical, was particularly good) nor with the staging of the Berkeley Street Theatre, but rather with the play itself. The genius of Angels in America lay in Kushner's ability to throw everything together--history, language, sex, politics, love, death--into a superb bricolage united by Kushner's cheerful apocalypticism, the play's flaw-engendering ambivalence aside. There's no such unity of theme in Homebody/Kabul outside of Reid's opening monologue, a marvellously wordplay-filled and self-annotated tale of the protagonist's encounters with an unsatisfying life given meaning by the exoticism of an old guidebook to Kabul(for something similar, see Rosie DiManno's Sunday account in the Toronto Star of a tour she made in Kabul following a 1964 gudiebook's advice). The remainder of the play, alas, is a disappointingly conventional story of a woman's disappearance in a foreign country and the efforts of her estranged nearest-and-dearest to come to terms with this disappearance even as they negotiate a strange and foreign culture with all of its perils. Reid's monologue alone was worth the cost of the ticket, and the rest of the story was enjoyable, but--perhaps unrealistically--I expected more from Mr. Kushner.