Monday, August 3, 2009
at the Manny Fried Playhouse
 a
one-night-only staged reading of
HOMEBODY/
KABUL
by Tony Kushner
Directed by Susan Forbes*
Monday, August 3rd @ 7:30pm
ADMISSION FREE/DONATIONS WELCOME!
Subversive
Theatre is proud to present a one-night-only staged reading of the play HOMEBODY/KABUL
by Tony Award-winning socialist playwright Tony Kushner. Written just
before the attacks of 9/11, this drama about oppression in Afghanistan under
the Taliban couldn't be more timely.
"I didn't imagine, when I was working on the
play, that by the time we produced it, the United States would be at war with
Afghanistan," author Kushner told interviewer Noah Adams on NPR's 'All
Things Considered' on Dec 3, 2001.
"I assumed that people watching the play would
really not know what the Northern Alliance was, or care particularly,"
Kushner explained. "I don't think I have to worry about that any
more."
The play, taking place in
London and the Afghan capital at the end of the '90s, follows the story of a
lonely and over-medicated British housewife -- a "homebody" --
falling under the spell of an out-of-date travel guide for Afghanistan.
Set in 1998 just after then-President Bill Clinton
had ordered bombings in Afghanistan, HOMEBODY/KABUL is a story in which
the troubled, lost Westerners within it are as much at endless war with
themselves, and each other, as Afghanistan is the hell on earth where people
forget even their own names.
As always with this playwright of ideas and commitment --
famous for his intensely political epic work ANGELS IN AMERICA --
Kushner compels us to look freshly at tinderbox issues that exist on several
intriguing levels. This is a play about lost civilizations and
unsolvable paradoxes, furious differences and opposites and disintegrating,
rotting pidgin cultures. It's about desolation and love, in land-mined
places, child murderers and fanatics, tranquilized existence and opium highs,
travel in the largest sense of the word-travel of the mind and soul. To
where? An unknowable mystery,
perhaps, where all confusion is banished.
Directed by Subversive Theatre’s
Overall Dramaturg Susan Forbes*, our staged reading features the acting
talents of Jane Cudmore, Tom Scahill*, Stephanie Dale, Doug Rogers, Jack
Agugliaro*, David Butterfield, Brian Zybala*, Nate Benson, Tamara S.
Hopersberger*.
The reading is Monday, August 3 at 7:30pm at
Subversive Theatre’s regular performance venue The Manny Fried Playhouse on
the third floor of North Buffalo’s Great Arrow Building at 255 Great Arrow
Avenue. Admission is free with
donations eagerly accepted before and after the performance.
For more information call Subversive Theatre at
716-408-0499.
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