From the Artistic Director, on Selling Kabul
I’m writing this note on August 31, the day the papers announced America’s war in Afghanistan is over. Which I mention not only for its significance to Sylvia Khoury’s play, which (at long last) will resume after Covid-19 paused our production eighteen months ago, but also because we have no idea what’ll happen between today and when you read this; it seems best to give it a time-stamp.
The war lasted 19 years and 47 weeks, dating to America’s first bombing of the Taliban regime on Oct. 7, 2001. It’s America’s longest war, far longer than its extended defeat in Vietnam, or its stalemate in Korea. Today, the day it ended, I’m sifting through the headlines, horrified over the images and news from across Afghanistan; devastated by the magnitude of loss and fear, desperate to help but feeling helpless; trying to understand why our efforts over the quick failure of our protracted efforts there; scared for what will happen next.
Photo from Getty Images.
And like those around me, I’m spinning in questions. After the courage and sacrifice from Afghan and American troops who fought together for two decades, not to mention the trillions of dollars spent, how did the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapse in just a matter of days? What would a more successful exit have looked like? Would the prevention of a total Taliban takeover have been worth the cost of remaining? Hours upon hours of commentary, hundreds of essays, a barrage of perspectives. We wonder how might this have unfolded differently in Tora Bora in 2001, or in Baghdad in 2003, as if such counterfactual thinking is at all productive. How do Americans contend with the painful familiarity of watching our government's actions bring destabilization and violence to other countries?
Selling Kabul, though, isn’t set in 2021 when I’m writing this and you’re reading it. Pointedly, Sylvia’s play is placed in an Afghanistan of almost ten years ago, in 2013, just after the U.S. announced it would reduce troops in Afghanistan from 68,000 to 34,000. She’s located her story twelve years into the war, just after Obama declared in a State of the Union that “the nature of our commitment [to Afghanistan would] change,” its new focus being on the mission of “training and equipping Afghan forces so that the country does not again slip into chaos” — a shift that allowed for increased Taliban presence, and with insufficient protection for the lives this impacted.
A taut and masterfully suspenseful drama, Selling Kabul zeroes in on Taroon, an Afghan translator for the U.S. military who’s in hiding at his sister’s apartment, desperate for the Special Immigrant Visa he had been promised, while outside the resurgent Taliban is targeting anyone who had collaborated with the Americans. It’s a searing critique of U.S. strategy at a time when we should have been paying more attention to the danger in which allies like Taroon, and those around him, were placed. As early as 2006, the press had been reporting that the Taliban was targeting Afghan translators. Ten years later, in 2016, the New York Times ran the headline “’They Will Kill Us:’ Afghan Translators Plead for Delayed U.S. Visas.” The non-profit No One Left Behind, “committed to ensuring that America keeps its promise to our allies and their families who risked their lives for our freedom,” reports that they have record of more than 300 interpreters and their family members killed because of their association with the United States. As of April this year, over 10,000 Afghans were still waiting for their visa applications to be processed.
All of Sylvia’s plays to-date locate with acuity the human cost of war and political strategies, and the moral hypocrisies that unavoidably accompany both. But her vision dives past the day’s headlines, seeing into the hallways and bedrooms where these costs are lived. Each of her plays is driven by intricately-observed character writing, attending to the human scale of history, finding her narratives in private, unexpected spaces and unsparingly digging into the torn hearts of the humans who live there, finding epic reckonings in these tiny rooms. As events outside incrementally escalate – a tension Sylvia builds with surgical precision — the quartet in Selling Kabul are caught in an excruciating mousetrap, forced to stay quiet while hunted, unable to trust even the ones they love most.
Photo from Getty Images.
In Sylvia’s hands, the brutal cosmology that plays out in this cramped apartment in Kabul, 2013, in the middle of a war that would continue for eight more years, becomes a call to action, to consider our participation in the governments who lead us. While each of her plays is its own world, its own tiny space in time, the careful specificity of her work extends its resonance beyond its time and place, beyond the day’s headlines. The danger Taroon is placed in, and the series of unthinkable decisions he and his family are forced to make, is made of broken promises by the U.S. to these characters caught in 2013 — promises of a stronger, freer Afghanistan, and of protection. But the play is also about the promises made to Afghans today, clinging to the fuselage of a plane, screaming for safety as their home is ripped apart, and to Vietnamese in Saigon in 1973, and to Cambodians in Phnom Penh in 1975. Selling Kabul carries the urgency of its broadest meaning: an appeal to consider the consequences of our actions, to see ourselves in our government, and to pay attention.
Adam Greenfield
September 2021
