Middle East Side Story

Comments (0) By Juliet Wittman Thursday, Apr 14 2011

Curious Theatre Company got its start more than ten years ago when a group of artists came together to produce Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The project left artistic director Chip Walton with an “almost insatiable appetite to continue producing that kind of theater -- epic, political,” he remembers. “Not in an agitprop way, but in a way that turns people’s heads upside down.” And Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul should do just that. Written before 9/11 but first produced shortly afterward, the play was rapidly absorbed into the national discussion. We’re able to see it more clearly today, Walton says, and given the continuing bloodshed in Afghanistan, the questions it raises are more pressing than ever.

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Homebody/Kabul “covers 5,000 years of history, explores the relationship of the West to the East -- both historically and in the present -- collides the personal with the political, and doesn’t let us off the hook,” he explains. Despite its essential seriousness and the fact that the evening begins with an almost hour-long monologue, the play is far from tedious, he says. It’s lively and episodic, “one of those plays that moves at a tempo that belies its length.”

It has taken ten years for Curious to get from Angels to Homebody, but given the winds of revolution blowing in the Middle East, the timing is exactly right. The show opens at 7:30 p.m. tonight at Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma Street, and runs Thursdays through Sundays through April 16; tickets are $42. For more information, go to www.curioustheatre.org or call 303-623-0524.
Sundays, 2 p.m.; Thursdays-Saturdays, 7:30 p.m. Starts: March 20. Continues through April 16, 2011