13AMbili Contents Apr 2004 Homebody/Kabul 14 Tony Kushner's remarkable opus is more timely than ever By Ma rtha Hostetter Bill Murray 18 BAMcinematek's April series co nfirms Murray has the best, last laugh Homebody/Kabul, Reed Birney & Maggie Gyllenhaal. By Matthew Buchholz Photo, Craig Schwartz OanceAfrica 2004 30 Drum mi ng and da ncing from near and far mark the start of summer By Susan Yung The It List 04 Dining Guide 08,35 Program I DanceAfrica, Bambara Ensemble A Brooklyn Guide insert To Home Furnishings A BROOKLYN GUIDE TO HOME FURNISHIN GS, INSERT COVER (top left, bottom left) image courtesy of Rico; (middle) image courtesy of Dyad; (top right, bottom right) Herman Miller and Eames· Molded Upcoming Events 32 Pl ywood Dining Chair are among the registered trademarks of Herman Miller, Inc. Image provided by David Allen Art & Design Gall ery, an author· BAMdirectory 33 ized retailer of Herman Miller for the Home. Cover Artist Alex Katz was born in Brooklyn in 1927, raised in Sl. Albans, Queens, and stud ied at the Cooper Union (New York) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine). His career spans five decades. Katz's art has affinities with commercial adver­ tisements and fash ion photography, reflecting his early interest in graphic design. His work is not centered around icons of pop culture, but rather generic objects and his personal acquaintances. Alex Katz fuses his interest in Egyptian art, the art of Utamaro, Matisse, and in the contemporary world in a cool , detached style uniquely his own. Since his first show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, his art has been the subject of monographs and catalogues, Cover, Alex Katz, The Sailor Hat, 2003 and numerous museum exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum Li nocut on Iyo glazed paper of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Saatchi 12" x 10-1 /2" (image) Collection in London, and the Bonn Museum (Germany). He lives in For BAMart information , New York. 718.636.4101 / [email protected] April2004 2004 Spring Season Alex Katz, The Sailor Hat, 2003 BAM Spring Alt . ENCORE Season sponsor: rIa Homebody/Kabul Reed Birney & Maggie Gyllenhaal. Photo, Cra ig Schwartz Home Away From Home By Martha Hostetter Ours is a time of connection; the private, and we must accept this, and it's a hard thing to accept, the private is gone. These words are strange to hear from a character known as Homebody, a London housewife who admits that she has little connection to her husband (she samples his anti-depressants to know how he's feeling) or her grown daughter. But after finding an out-of-date travel book, A Historical Guide to Kabul, the Homebody (played by Tony nominee Linda Emond) takes an imaginative leap-reaching out to The Other and to Afghanistan , a country she describes as "so at the heart of the world that the world has forgotten it." Set in 1998 and 1999 and written well before 9/11 , Homebody/Kabul premiered in New York just months after the terrorist attacks made it clear that privacy is indeed a quaint and outdated notion, that what happens in distant lands affects us at home. Since the premiere, Kushner has made extensive revisions, but the political narrative is intact. When Homebody/Kabul appears at BAM's Harvey Theater from May 11 - 30, audiences who have heard pundits and politicians weigh in on 9/11 will have a chance to hear from a writer who's been thinking about the collisions between East and West for years. "Part of my job as a playwright, and a political playwright, is to pay attention," Kushner says. (In an eerily prophetic line, an Afghan woman, furious over America 's support of the Taliban for the Homebody/Kabul sake of a gas pipeline, threatens a visiting Westerner: "You love the Taliban so much, bring them to New York! Well, don't worry, they're coming to New York!") The play came to life as a monologue for the Homebody, which Kushner asked Emond to read for him as he was developing it. "I'd never seen anything like it," she recalls. "It took time just to figure out where the verb was in a sentence. The piece is like an opera-not just an aria, but the whole opera-with all different cadences and colors. I read it several times over a period of years. Somehow, in the process of having these strange sentences come out of my mouth, I began to feel that there was a particular person there demanding our attention, getting impatient to come out." This magnificently capacious speech takes stylistic and intellectual detours more common to fiction than drama, and sprinkles clues about the mystery to come, when the Homebody disappears in Kabul and her husband and daughter travel there to find her. Was she killed by an angry mob? In the path of a cruise missile sent by President Clinton to Afghan terrorist training camps after attacks on U.S. embassies? Or has she donned a burqa and disappeared into the faceless crowd? For the innocents abroad, Kabul is a land of confusion and paradox: Religious police prowl the streets with rubber hoses, a librarian loses her mind for lack of books, an actor pines for the music of Frank Sinatra ("Come fly with me, let's fly, let's flyaway ... "), and the remaining Westerners retreat into an opium haze. Meanwhile, the Homebody's daughter, Priscilla (Maggie Gyllenhaal), searches for her mother with the help of a poet who writes in the "universal " language of Esperanto because, he says, it carries no history, and thus no history of oppression. Director Frank Galati says language, in all its forms, "The piece is like an opera-not just an aria, but the whole opera-with all different cadences and colors." is at the crux of the play. "Technical jargon, untranslatable idioms, erudite vocabulary- these kinds of speech separate us from one another," he says, pointing out that in one scene an Afghan woman needs five languages (Pashto, Dari , Arabic, French , and English) to describe what has happened to her country. Afghanistan itself is the most unknowable figure in the play-exotic and desolate, at the crossroads of civilizations and fought over for centuries by the likes of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Someday, Kushner says, he hopes to bring his play to Kabul, where the national theater has reopened (though its roof and walls are still pockmarked from bombs). He already has a translator -a onetime refugee who lived in Queens for 26 years and who helped Kushner with the play's Pashto and Dari speeches. The Afghani recently returned to his homeland and is eagerly awaiting the Kabul premiere. "For me, theater is about establishing lines of communication between different experiences and cultures," Kushner says. "Just understanding each other is immensely difficult work. In the end, these characters have a long way to go, but they learn to be humble in the face of how hard it is." _ Martha Hostetter has written about culture and cultural policy for the Gotham Gazette, Village Voice, American Theatre, and other publications. A BAMdialogue with Tony Kushner will be held May 16 at 5:30pm. 15 2004 Spring Season Brooklyn Academy of Music Alan H. Fishman William I. Campbell Chairman of the Board Vice Chairman of the Board Karen Brooks Hopkins Joseph V. Melillo President Executive Producer presents Siroe Approximate BAM Harvey Theater running time: Apr 17, 20, 23 & 24, 2004 at 7 :30pm 3 hours and 20 minutes with two Music by George Frideric Handel intermissions Libretto by Pietro Metastasio & Nicola Haym Venice Baroque Orchestra Conducted by Andrea Marcon Directed by Jorge Lavelli Scenic design by Alain Lagarde Costumes by Francesco Zito Lighting by Zeljko Sestak Assistant director Carlo Bellamio Musical assistant Massimiliano RaschieUi English titles by Chris Bergen Sound effects by Jean Marie Bourdat Sung in Italian with English surtitles An Apollonesque production Executive producer Julian Fifer BAM 2004 Spring Season is sponsored by Altria Group, Inc. Support for Siroe is provided by Francena T. Harrison Foundation Trust, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Italian Cultural Institute of New York. Leadership support for BAM Opera is provided by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation and The Andrew W Mel/on Foundation with additional support from The Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation, Inc. and Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust. Generous support for Siroe provided by International Friends of the Venice Music Festival. Siroe Cast Cosroe, King of Persia Vito Priante (In order of Siroe, first-born son of Cos roe Liliana Rugiero appearance) Medarse, younger son of Cosroe Roberto Balconi Emira , princess of Cambaia, in disguise as Idapse Katerina Beranova Laodice, Cos roe's lover Simone Kermes Arasse, general of the Persian army Matthew Burns Venice Baroque Andrea Marcon , Director Orchestra First Violin Double bass Luca Mares Alessandro Sbrogio Vania Pedronetto Giuseppe Cabrio Lute Teresa Ratcliff Ivana Zanenghi Evangelina Mascardi Second Violin Giorgio Baldan Bassoon Giulia Panzeri Carles Cristobal Ferran Margherita Zane Rossella Croce Flute Michele Favaro Viola Alessandra Di Vincenzo Oboe Meri Skejic Michele Favaro Nicola Favaro Cello Francesco Galligioni Harpsichord Daniele Cernuto Andrea Marcon Massimiliano Raschietti Staff Production stage manager Caroline Dufresne Technical director Jeffery Duer Assistant to the costume designer Fabrizia Migliarotti Orchestra administrator Arianna Fuser Repetiteu rs I ri na Rees Apollonesque Managing producer Brett Egan Costumes provided courtesy of Fondazione Teatro La Fenice di Venezia . Columbia Artists Management, LLC - exclusive North American Management of the representation of Venice Baroque Orchestra. Contact: Jean-Jacques Cesbron, CAMI, 165 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019, www.cami.com.