Homebody/Kabul

Final Revised Version

Tony Kushner

• Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781559362399
• eBook ISBN: 9781559366045
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

“Mr. Kushner’s glorious specialty is in giving theatrical life to internal points of view, in which our thoughts meld with a character’s wayward speculations or fantasies... He makes the personal and the universal, the trivial and the cosmic come simultaneously to life in a single character’s bewilderment.” –Ben Brantley, New York Times

“An extraordinary play…a deeply felt, expansively ruminative drama.” –Paul Taylor, Independent (London)

“What a feast of a play. No playwright in the English language has a greater passion for language than Kushner. And to this Kushner adds that rare quality in American theater, a yearning to go beyond domestic stories and into the great world of political struggle. Brilliant. It keeps us thinking.” –Richard Christiansen, Chicago Tribune

“This eerily timely work about Afghanistan is comparably mesmerizing and mournful, vast and intimate, emotionally generous and stylistically fabulist, wildly verbal, politically progressive and scarily well informed.” –Linda Winer, Newsday


In Homebody/Kabul, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures. Written before 9/11, Homebody/Kabul premiered in New York in December 2001 and has had highly successful productions in London, Providence, Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. This version incorporates all the playwright's changes and is now the definitive version of the text.


Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.

ACT TWO

SCENE 1

The hotel room. It’s dark.

Milton is sprawled asleep atop his covers, fully dressed, the phone next to him.

A figure in a green burqa enters. She switches on the lights.

A muezzin’s call for evening prayers, amplified through a loudspeaker, comes through from outside.

She goes to Milton, looks down at him. She sniffs.

She sees the empty bottle, picks it up, brings it close to her face-grille, reads the label, upends it: empty.

PRISCILLA

Where did you get this?

(Milton sits bolt upright, looks at the figure in the burqa and SCREAMS, leaps out of bed.)

MILTON

Get out! Get out! Wrong room! Wrong room! Please, please leave me alone!

(As he is screaming the figure is saying, “Dad, Dad!” as she removes her burqa. It’s Priscilla, wearing the headphones, discman strapped around her waist.)

dp n="85" folio="62" ?

MILTON

You half startled me to . . . Skulking about like a panto ghost. Are you insane?

PRISCILLA

Oh, watch that. Don’t want to get into all that.

MILTON

Yes, well, insane, I might be speaking hyperbolically, loosely, not precisely with regard to your particular . . . particulars, but I have been alone, here, worrying. For hours. You’re the one ought to be watching herself, should you feel yourself slipping. It’s not a bit like home.

PRISCILLA

Yes, I know, unlike you I have actually bothered to go out and have a look at it.

MILTON

No clean hospitals here. Mentally ill women get Toyota-trucked to the old soccer stadium, I shouldn’t wonder, and (Makes a throat-slitting gesture) . . . pffffffffffffft.

PRISCILLA

Enjoying yourself? Fantastic, two years have passed and you’ve never mentioned it and you decide that now? Here?

Finally, you—

You’re drunk.

MILTON

And you have a past record of mental affliction.

PRISCILLA

I attempted suicide.

MILTON

Which I believe is accounted a sign of—

dp n="86" folio="63" ?

PRISCILLA

Lots of people attempt—

MILTON

Lots of people are crazy, Priscilla, that proves—

PRISCILLA

I don’t have to prove anything, Milton.

(Studying Milton for a moment, then:)

You’re attacking me because you’re horrified to think she might still be alive.

MILTON

She isn’t.

PRISCILLA

Where’s her body then? Her corpse? Why don’t we have it?

(Beat)

I wasn’t crazy, I’m not crazy. I was upset.

MILTON

Upset?! Upset causes people to overeat! Or to paint their hair and shove pins through their nipples! Upset people don’t destroy themselves.

PRISCILLA

I was eighteen, I was stupid, so I, so I swallowed pills and—

MILTON

Many, many pills.

PRISCILLA

Yes, many many many pills. And—

Oh what a pity. And I was having such a lovely day.

MILTON

Upset! Stupid, yes, absolutely, I grant you stupid.

dp n="87" folio="64" ?

(Little pause.)

PRISCILLA

I needed time to, a place with close solid walls and an utter absence of the two of you. And you certainly stayed away. The electroshock was just dramatic effect, I agreed to it to punish you two.

MILTON

It was effective.

PRISCILLA

Was it? I was in there for months. You never visited once. The nurses remarked.

MILTON

Left hospital two years ago and has steadfastly refused to move out, yet in this ghastly place you stay out all day.

PRISCILLA

Not that you care but the hospital wasn’t so very clean. Nicer of course than the places I saw today but then even the National Health looks good compared to—

MILTON

None of us ever recovered.

She went to see you in hospital that night and she never returned. Not really. I mean she returned, home, but . . . What should I have said. What was there to say?

(They look at each other. Priscilla shrugs. Little pause.)

PRISCILLA

I saw horrible things today. A hospital where—

MILTON

Please don’t.

dp n="88" folio="65" ?

PRISCILLA

Horrible. But it was me there, seeing it, me. I thought, what kind of person watches herself seeing such things? Conceited, yeah? But I watched. I di...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• BOOKS BY TONY KUSHNER AVAILABLE FROM TCG
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• PRODUCTION HISTORY
• ACT ONE
• ACT TWO
• ACT THREE
• PERIPLUM
• AN AFTERWORD
• CREDIT INFORMATION
• Copyright Page