Jim Nicola, artistic director of the New York Theatre Workshop, which has been behind the piece throughout its three-year gestation, reports that they have had to bring in additional PR expertise to cope with the global media attention. Before 11 September, the worry had been that local Muslims might take offence at a gay, Jewish writer putting words into the mouths of their co-religionists in a country he had never visited. Then the anxiety shifted to whether the play would trample on the sensitivities of pro-American groups (the precinct just down the road lost 13 firemen). It’s a tribute to New York’s gutsy determination to get on with business as usual that there was only one day (12 September) when the production’s fate hung in the balance.”I’ve always known,” says Kushner, “that people coming in thinking that this was going to be another Angels in America were going to leave either changed or disappointed.” The risk, though, of false expectations has been exacerbated by the current political climate. It has not helped that, in a much-reported move the National Endowment for the Arts is dragging its feet over whether to authorise a recommended grant of $100,000 for a further production of the play at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California. Censorship? Part and parcel of a new world where, in the cause of anti-terrorism, civil liberties are being eroded? Well, hard to say at this point. But the publicity over this delay in the New York press has, perhaps, helped to promote an erroneous image of Homebody/ Kabul as a piece of hot journalism instead of as the deeply-felt, expansively ruminative drama it is.Watching it at a preview – where they were still experimenting with a crucial scene, set at the putative Kabul site of the grave of Cain, the cradle (so to speak) of how we deal with murderous guilt – I was reminded of Costa-Gavras’s movie Missing, which is set in Chile in the aftermath of the 1973 coup against Allende.

It’s as a point of contrast, though, rather than of comparison that that work leapt into the memory. The 1982 film follows an almost traditional mythic route: a conservative American (investigating his son’s disappearance) is radicalised by the realisation that the US puts business interests above those of the individual. Homebody/Kabul, by contrast, could be characterised by its refusal to adhere to that oddly comforting pattern. And with an intellectual agility that most dramatists would kill to possess. Encompassing the emotional underpinning of languages as various as computer-speak, Pashtun, and Esperanto, it takes us on an elusively emotional journey to the point where the daughter can allow herself to grieve.Mention of his analyst leads Kushner into talking about his mother who died 10 years ago.

“She was a really remarkable bassoonist who recorded with Stravinsky. She left New York and her career to go and raise us in a small town in Louisiana and suffered terribly for this.” She was not “absent” like the Homebody character, but evinced “the same simultaneity of attractiveness, arrogant display and self-mortification and shame – a certain kind of privileged powerlessness and ambivalent relationship to power”. The private has now fed into the public in a massive, unanticipated manner. “The astonishing resonance of the play,” says Donnellan “is that it is about somebody trying to mourn a body that they don’t have, and the fact that the piece is juxtaposed with this bizarre situation in this city at this time, where so many people are in the same position, brings that home all the more piercingly.’.The production has a cultural advisor, Nisar Ahmed Zuri, who was born near Kabul and now edits an Afghan paper in Queens. “When we did the first run-through, the bombing was just beginning,” recalls Kushner, “and Mr Zuri said he looks forward to the day when he could translate the whole play into Dari and see it performed in his native city.” With the Taliban’s collapse, that day may be sooner than thought.