Sylvia Khoury’s intense-as-a-black-hole Selling Kabul is set in the Afghanistan capital during the 95 minutes the drama takes to unfold. In a not quite claustrophobic one-bedroom apartment, highly wired Afiya (Marjan Neshat) is faced with the potentially dire consequences of shielding her fugitive brother Taroon (Dario Ladani Sanchez) from the relentless Taliban.
Taroon, frequently watching tv and picking at the short food supply against Afiya’s determined wishes, is awaiting news about his hospitalized pregnant wife. He receives it when Afiya returns to announce he has a son. Taroon’s impulse is to leave for the hospital immediately, but Afiya insists such an action would not only put him in danger but endanger herself and her husband Jawid (Mattico David) as well.
Visited by friendly neighbor Layla (Francis Benhamou), who offers no more than momentary relief (Taroon is sequestered in a closet), Aliya encounters her next obstacle when Jawid arrives. After Layla is dispatched to see about her own crying infant, Jawid issues a worse hospital report. Taliban soldiers invaded, obviously onto Taroon’s indisposed wife there. Although Taroon had believed he had outfoxed the Taliban as to his whereabouts, it’s now clear they are zeroing in. Occasionally, designer Lee Kinney’s sounds of low overhead planes threaten, emphasizing the ominous environment.
Since Selling Kabul is a high-wire drama, worse developments befall Taroon, Afiya, Jawid, and Layla. The four are a row of vertical dominoes collapsing, though no further shocks will be itemized here. It’s enough to say “drama” hardly begins to describe what goes on. Even moments of melodrama poke through. Aside from Layla’s initial visit and an exchange between Taroon and Jawid towards fade-out, bickering and outright knockdown-drag-outs dominate.
Khoury’s achievement is unmistakable. She brings to the stage a convincing sense of what trying to live a normal life in the benighted country feels like. Put another way, she brings harshly up-close-and-personal what normal Kabul life was for citizens in 2013. For audiences eavesdropping on these horrors several months after the larger American presence in Afghanistan has been withdrawn, dramatist Khoury raises a harrowing vision of how much worse Afghanis are existing in 2021-2022. (Selling Kabul was originally produced at Williamstown in 2019, with the March 2020 Playwrights engagement postponed during rehearsals.)
That’s if there can be even worse conditions as these oppressed characters pace or sit on the floor of designer Arnulfo Maldonado’s furniture-free flat. When sitting, the women sometimes sew to distract themselves. Taroon also sews alongside sister Afiya, his needlework a plot point not to be overlooked.
Tyne Rafaeli directs Selling Kabul with ears and eyes keenly tuned to Khoury’s depiction of oppressed people condemned to silences broken only by released anger at a hopeless, and worsening, situation. Neshat’s performance as a woman with an unbendable steel spine is impossible to look away from as her Afiya is unable to escape the metaphorical walls pushing in on her. She’s trapped no matter how often she retreats to the up-to-date, upstage kitchen for preparing tea and coffee no one is calm enough to drink.
Tall, angular Sanchez makes Taroon all the sadder as a man kept from celebrating a son’s birth. Benhamou, handed a role that at first looks to be merely the heroine’s best friend, shows sterner stuff as events mount. She’s staunchly moving at it. David’s Jawid is rightly and quietly effective. He admits to living Kabul’s restricted life more or less peacefully by offering no resistance, by showily accepting conditions as they are.
Experiencing Selling Kabul might be likened to being caught in a locked steam room. Leaving the production, spectators might feel compelled to search out a decompression chamber.
Selling Kabul opened December 6, 2021, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through December 23. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
