Selling Kabul by Sylvia Khoury shines a light on the day-to-day struggle of a family in war-torn Afghanistan. Nothing is safe; nothing stays the same.
Taroon became an interpreter for the Americans early in the Afghanistan conflict. It doesn’t matter if it was for the money or politics or the prestige. Now he is being hunted down as an enemy of the Taliban.
Taroon has been hiding in the home of his sister, Afiya, and her patient, problem-solving husband, Jawid. They cannot reveal his location with anyone; not to the neighbour, Leyla, and not to Taroon’s wife who has just delivered his son.
He waits for any word of the Americans coming to rescue him as he paces frantically, nervously. For Afiya, everything he does seems a loud alarm that will alert the Taliban; they will see his shadow at the window, they will see the flickering of the television, they will know he answers the phone. He seems unrealistic about how his existence threatens everyone around him.
For new father Taroon, safety becomes less an issue than a frantic need to meet his son. If Jawid will not drive him to the hospital, he will walk across the city at night. Afiya cannot make him understand that his actions reverberate throughout his family and his community. “My stupid brother, if you step outside that door, you murder your child, you murder your wife, you murder my husband, you murder me.”
He hides in the closet while Afiya entertains a suspicious neighbour, Leyla, who is convinced that Taroon could only be hiding here. The Taliban grows closer. Afiya’s and Leyla’s husbands as well as Taroon’s wife have been beaten by the Taliban for information. There are a relentless and increasing number of dangerous situations that converge on Taroon and his community. The Taliban will stop at nothing to hunt him down.
Playwright Sylvia Khoury (2022 Pulitzer prize finalist) has written an increasingly tense drama about the decisions that change the terrain almost minute by minute in a country torn apart by terror.
We might first address how appropriate this play is considering what is going on in the world. A victim has no time for the “why” when there is a gun pointed at them. Man’s inhumanity to man. You have to go back a lot further than Robert Burns in 1786. Nonetheless, Khoury presents a family with a gun pointed at it.
She doesn’t let us stray too far from Taroon’s dilemma. Khoury has continually throttled the tension with an avalanche of events and information. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does.
Khoury has made us think about Afghanistan but also Gaza, Ukraine, African Americans, immigrants, Indigenous Americans, gays and transgenders, women, Catholics and Protestants, the North and South, Cain and Abel… well, there are hundreds, thousands in varying degrees of oppression; power and control.
Director Jude Sandy has established and maintained this tension with the capable assistance Raz Ayer as the frantic and willful Taroon, Awesta Zarif as his sister Afiya, trying to balance truth against decision, Lois Abdelmalek as Leyla, trying to protect her family, and Ahsan Ali, the patient, gentle husband.
Selling Kabul is running at the InterArt Theatre Company in Philadelphia through November 19.