‘Homebody/Kabul’ to Open Taper’s Season

Tony Kushner’s timely new play about Afghanistan, “Homebody/Kabul,” and a new play by August Wilson will bookend the Mark Taper Forum’s 2002-03 season. The season also will consist of the West Coast premiere of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Ten Unknowns”; a version of “Big River” that includes deaf actors; a new play about L.A. nannies by Lisa Loomer; and a new Culture Clash production, “Chavez Ravine,” about a neighborhood just a few blocks from the Taper.

Running Sept. 19-Oct. 27, Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul” will launch the season. Focusing on a British woman who disappears in Afghanistan in 1998, the play’s New York production in December drew favorable comment not only for its own merits but also for Kushner’s prescience--it was written before the events of Sept. 11 made Afghanistan the center of worldwide attention.

Some critics found the play’s almost four-hour length too long, but Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson said Kushner “sharpened it, connecting the mother’s story with the daughter’s better” for subsequent productions in Berkeley and Providence--and is still open to the possibility of further revisions. Kushner is best known for the former Taper-bred hit “Angels in America.” The first part of the play, “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches,” went on to win the 1993 Pulitzer Prize.

As previously reported, the Taper will present Deaf West Theatre’s production of “Big River,” the Huckleberry Finn musical by Roger Miller and William Hauptman, Nov. 14-Dec. 29. Davidson said director Jeff Calhoun has no inhibitions about moving the show from Deaf West’s smaller space in North Hollywood to the larger and differently configured Taper. The show’s potential audience, Davidson said, is much bigger than the audiences who already saw the Deaf West production.

“A certain scale of musical has a place in the Taper,” Davidson said, “and this one seems very right in terms of our ongoing interest in how signing connects with storytelling.”

The different but parallel worlds of nannies from East L.A. and the Westside homes where they work is the subject of Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out,” slated for Jan. 30-March 9. The new play was commissioned and developed by the Taper. Loomer wrote two earlier Taper productions, “The Waiting Room” and “Expecting Isabel.”

Baitz’s “Ten Unknowns” (March 27-May 4, 2003) examines an American artist who’s been rediscovered after nearly 30 years of self-imposed obscurity in Mexico. It premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater a year ago. Baitz wrote three previous Taper shows: “Dutch Landscape,” “The Substance of Fire” and “Three Hotels.”

The premiere of Culture Clash’s “Chavez Ravine” (May 29-July 6, 2003) will look into the history of the site of Dodger Stadium, going back to the communities razed to make room for a failed housing project, and continuing forward to the day when Fernando Valenzuela became a starting pitcher for the Dodgers in 1981. The comedy group’s three members--Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Siguenza--will be joined by an actress and directed by Lisa Peterson. The play was commissioned and developed by the Taper.

Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” (July 31-Sept. 7, 2003) will be the ninth play in his cycle of scripts that are set in different decades of African American life during the last century. This one is set in 1904. Directed by Marion McClinton, it will premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in June 2003 before coming to the Taper.

Asked if the Taper wants to produce this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog,” Davidson said he offered a slot in the coming season to the play’s producers, but they decided to move it to Broadway, where it opened Sunday. The play is written by Suzan-Lori Parks, who heads the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at CalArts in Valencia. “Now that it’s a commercial production, they’ll wait and see what to do with it next,” Davidson said.