HOMEBODY
by Tony Kushner
August 3-5 & August 10-12
Fridays/Saturdays at 8p; Sundays at 4p
PLEASE NOTE: THERE IS NO LATE SEATING FOR THIS PERFORMANCE.
JUST ADDED: Two Roe-Jan residents share perspectives about writer, historian and activist Nancy Hatch Dupree. Her book about Kabul inspired Tony Kushner to write his play.
Pre-show talk on Friday, August 10 at 7:15pm with Copake resident Stanley Cohen, of the Scone Foundation which presented Ms. Hatch with its Archivist of the Year Award in 2011 recognizing her work in Afghanistan.
Post-show talk on Sunday, August 12 at 5:00pm with Jay Corcoran, from Ancram, who spent a week in 2009 traveling through Afghanistan with Ms. Hatch and filming her for a short video documentary series.
Taking place just before 9/11, an inquisitive middle-aged British housewife, safely ensconced in her respectable kitchen, grapples with Afghanistan's turbulent, complex history and her own rather unremarkable life. She clutches an outdated guidebook to the country which sparks her curiosity and rattles her complacency.
“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, The New York Times
Tony Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received he Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America. He co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film Munich, and he wrote the screenplay for the 2012 film Lincoln. Both movies were critically acclaimed, and he received Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay. He received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013.
His other plays include Hydriotaphia, Slavs!: Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, A Bright Room Called Day, Homebody/Kabul, and the book for the musical Caroline, Or Change. His new translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children was performed at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2006, starring Meryl Streep and directed by George C. Wolfe. Kushner has also adapted Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, Corneille's The Illusion, and S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk.
Photo of Tony Kushner by Joan Marcus