We Should Have Listened to Tony Kushner About Kabul.

I woke up this morning in August, 2021, in Kabul — or, more precisely inside the powerful, prescient play, “Homebody, Kabul” at the New York Theatre Workshop, 20 years ago — surrounded by Tony Kushner and Roma Torre and Carol Villano, and I knew I had been here before.

Barely a few months after the World Trade Center Towers, where I spent 6 years of my life, were destroyed, and nearly 3,000 humans slaughtered in the attack, we ventured back to Broadway, or, Off-Broadway to be exact.

It was only because a new play from the brilliant Tony Kushner was opening — his first play since “Angels in America”. Kushner wrote and rewrote “Homebody, Kabul,” for several years before 9/11, eerily warning us about the Taliban in Afghanistan in 1998 and 1999, and their appetite for brutality, inhumanity and Jihadism.

I went to see it at the recommendation of Roma Torre, then NY 1’s Theatre Critic, with whom I became friends a decade earlier, when both of us worked at News 12 Long Island. We sat in the old East 4th Street theatre for the next 4 hours, mesmerized by an opening 45 minute monologue by the actress Linda Emond, playing a lonely English woman who dreamed of the romance of old Kabul for decades.

When she lived out her dream and went to Kabul in Act 2, and her family followed to search…