Tony Kushner: ‘It’s No Time for Silence’

“Ours is a time of connection,” says a British woman, about to disappear inside a surreal version of Afghanistan, in Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” The new play is scheduled to open in December at the New York Theatre Workshop.

“The private, and we must accept this, the private is gone. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted.”

These words of bittersweet globalism carry an especially acidic tinge after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Already scheduled for a West Coast premiere next spring at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, “Homebody/Kabul” is guaranteed tremendous controversy.

Kushner, 43, became an international sensation on the broad shoulders of “Angels in America,” in which Reagan-era politics abutted cosmic surveillance and the AIDS crisis. Kushner’s latest work, portions of which have already played in London and elsewhere, asks questions such as: What is the nature of the West’s relationship to Afghanistan? To a ruling body such as the Taliban? Can America truly claim innocence lost, given its own foreign policy entanglements?

Here’s another question. How many hot potatoes can one playwright juggle per career?

Kushner spoke to The Times from Manhattan.

Tony Kushner: I’ll give you a line from the play. An Afghan woman is talking to a British woman about American support for the Taliban in the early days, by way of Pakistan. She says: “If you love the Taliban so much, why don’t you bring them to New York?”

And she says: “Well, don’t worry. They’re coming to New York.”

We all knew this was going to happen someday. These people planned this, in this country, for years, basically out in the open. And the CIA, with a $30-billion budget, couldn’t do anything?

Michael Phillips: Here’s something you said in 1990 around the time you wrote “A Bright Room Called Day” [set in 1930s Germany]: “There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world they’re living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or the bad, or some mixture of the two.”

Kushner: I don’t think anybody’s even questioning it: This is it. This is a turning point in the history of America, a turning point in the lives of everyone who’s living through the aftermath.

Something has definitely ended, and something new has begun. And I can’t think of another time when this country has been called upon to examine itself, examine its responses--or rather, to examine how it should proceed in responding, which I believe should be in a circumspect and compassionate and thoughtful manner.

I was stuck in Ireland when this was going on; it took me five days to get back. I was reading mostly the British and Irish press, which was full of great feeling for the American people, and the suffering of the people of New York.

It was also full of a kind of European horror at the American cowboy mentality so stunningly embodied by our president. It created an impression that frightened me--the impression that America could only respond to this by talking like this was the shootout at OK Corral.

A depressing number of people think this is truly a war, which it is not, in any sense. But an even larger number of people, I think, believe they don’t know who we should attack. And I think that’s good. That’s appropriate.... If there’s any way out of this mess, if there’s a way to formulate a response in which justice is done but the whole world isn’t destabilized in the process, then we must move carefully.

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Phillips: When did you begin thinking about how the play might take shape?

Kushner: I’ve always been interested in Afghanistan for a variety of reasons. I was very disturbed and concerned about Afghanistan during the Soviet war there, horrified at how the Soviet Union was behaving.

And I read Doris Lessing’s book on the subject, and saw documentary footage about what was going on there after the Soviets withdrew. It was pure mayhem, to a great degree carried out with weapons sold to these people by the CIA, and Pakistan, even China in cooperation with the U.S.

That disturbed me. I began to learn more about the history of the place and realized it was an immensely fascinating country.

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Phillips: Did you and New York Theatre Workshop artistic director Jim Nicola discuss the idea of postponing or canceling the play?

Kushner: I’ll be honest. There has been some discussion about it. But I didn’t consider the possibility of postponing for very long. It’s weird, because I’ve been working on this play a long time. I wrote a monologue--which is now the first act of the three-act, 14-character play--over two years ago.

I’ve been researching Afghanistan for years, and of course it’s odd to be doing something that’s so much in the news, on the moment, about which there are obviously incredibly intense feelings.

The play is simply an attempt to think about the history of Afghanistan, in a very complicated way. It’s also about mourning and grieving and loss. And I don’t think silence is what we want to ask of artists at a terrible time.

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Phillips: So what can we hope to get from our playwrights at a time like this?

Kushner: Plays! Plays. Although God knows there should be a certain degree of caution approaching the subject of this horror. As with Auschwitz, or the slave ships, there are places where art should only proceed with the greatest caution. It would be unseemly, in my opinion, to rush into TV movies about Sept. 11. I don’t think that sentiment’s going to stop anybody, but I’m hoping people will be respectful of the horror--unlike Bush, who led what seemed to be a pep rally on a mass grave last Saturday.

There’s no shortage of feeling these days. But art also has an underrated function of asking people to think, asking people to marry their thought and feeling.

It’s just incredibly important right now for this country to move in an intelligent manner. It seems as if [Ariel] Sharon and [Yasser] Arafat are going to recommence peace talks, and peace in the Middle East is incredibly important. Forgiving Third World debt is incredibly important. I think stopping the traffic of arms the United States provides to the rest of the world is an incredibly important step. And I think addressing the legacy of colonialism all over the developing world is an incredibly important step.

These are the things that will eventually drain people like [Osama] bin Laden of the ability to recruit suicide bombers. A certain misinterpretation of Islam may give some of these people the courage to do what they do, but they’re not doing it because they’re Muslim. They’re doing it because they come from a part of the world where life is so desperate, they quite literally feel they have nothing to lose, or at least they know people who have nothing to lose.

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Phillips: Like the Afghan refugee living in London says in “Homebody/Kabul”: “I stole bread for my starving family. I stole bread from a starving family.”

Kushner: Right. Jimmy Carter said it when he was president: America doesn’t really want to become the world’s boss, and it shouldn’t be. We don’t want to become the Roman Empire. We should have a vision for something better.

If Americans begin to realize the interconnectedness of things through even something as horrible as terrorism, then perhaps we can start to realize the world is a complicated place. People will always be able to get into this country.... This country really can defend itself only by behaving justly with the rest of the world.

If we can do that, if we tackle the question of our place in the world, we can begin the new century in a spirit of transformation and justice. And if we ignore that, it’ll be at our peril, and the peril of the entire planet.