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"Every grave is empty.
Every grave holds nothing but dust."
-Marabout, Homebody/Kabul
"We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century.... And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
-George W Bush, Address to the Nation, 21 September 20012
On 28 and 29 October 2001, Tony Kushner, Jim Nicola (the New York Theatre Workshop producer), and the cast of Kushner's then forthcoming U.S. debut of Homebody/Kabul appeared at New York City's Guggenheim as part of its "Works and Process" series.3 Their appearance took place just after their first week of rehearsal, which had been delayed for a week from its original start date by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (including a thwarted attack resulting in a downed plane in a Pennsylvania field) on 11 September2001-justthreeweeks earlier. Kushner and Nicola spoke with moderator Mary Sharp Cronson, producer of the "Works and Process" series, to introduce brief cast readings of monologue portions of Homebody/Kabu/s script. As the actors read, they sat in street clothes at music stands holding the script pages. Linda Emond's delivery as the Homebody was somber, slowly paced, and thoughtful, tinged with sadness. In this performance she delivered none of the effervescent, lilting liveliness that she embodied by the time the show opened in December. Likewise, while the audience chuckled at the more obvious laugh lines (the Hombeody's goofy translation of a Farsi saying, for example, into "the man who has patience, has roses, the man who has no patience, has no trousers"4), the silence at other times weighed heavily in the room. For instance, when the Homebody begins musing on Kabul, Afghanistan, she calls it "a city which, as we all know, has undergone change." "As we all know" was pointed, at the Guggenheim; Emond, teary eyed, took in the New York audience in a long glance as she said these words with a shaky voice. Similarly, in another passage the Homebody muses about the ways in which she thinks history must recede to a certain point before human beings can or are willing to comprehend or make meaning of it:
[W]e shudder to recall the...