When taking a story from the page to the stage, things usually go one of two ways: Use the book as a blueprint and create an entirely new experience (e.g., The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; or, at the more extreme end, anything by Elevator Repair Service); or follow the novel to the letter.
Matthew Spangler’s absorbing adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, which just opened on Broadway, chooses the latter—and, let’s be honest, more commercially viable—approach. Why mess with a beloved No. 1 New York Times best seller that’s sold millions upon millions of copies worldwide?
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
If you know the book, you could practically follow along as you watch the show; that’s how faithful Spangler’s version is to Hosseini’s original. Even the opening and closing lines are the same. (And if you don’t know it, don’t worry. Judging by all the surprising audience reactions at my matinee—gasps, sighs of disbelief and relief, applause—many theatergoers weren’t familiar with the twists and turns.)
We first meet our ever-present narrator, Amir (Amir Arison, who just wrapped a nine-season run on NBC’s The Blacklist), at age 38, in his adopted hometown of San Francisco in 2001; he then takes us back to 1975 in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was born and raised and watched John Wayne movies with the best kite runner he’d ever known, Hassan (Eric Sirakian, speaking volumes even in his character’s quietest moments). “I spent the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan, but back then, I never really thought of him as a friend,” Amir says. “I was Pashtun, he was Hazara. I was Sunni, he was Shia-a. Nothing was ever going to change that. But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and nothing was going to change that either.” Hassan and his father, Ali (Evan Zes) may have lived in a mud servants’ shack, but Amir’s father, Baba (an exceptional Faran Tahir), treated them like family.
Everyone talks about stories in The Kite Runner. Because Hassan cannot read (“That Hassan would grow up illiterate like most servants was decided the minute he was born,” explains Amir), Amir read the Persian epic Shahnamah to him; Hassan especially liked the tragic tale of “Rostam and Sohrab”—so much that he eventually names his son Sohrab (Sirakian in a natural and excellent bit of double-casting). Amir fails miserably at sports, so turns to short-story writing, and as a preteen he pens a beautiful fable about a magic cup and a man whose tears turn to pearls. When Amir meets Soraya (Azita Ghanizada), the woman he’ll eventually marry, she has her nose buried in Wuthering Heights. “Sad stories make good books,” she comments. Her father, General Taheri (Houshang Touzie), looks down on Amir’s ambition of becoming a writer. “Ah. A storyteller,” he sniffs. “Well, people need stories too, to divert them at difficult times like this.”
Inevitably, The Kite Runner gets dragged down by all of those stories—not to mention by Amir’s constant narration. Arison can be a little stiff in those stand-still-and-reflect-on-something-monumental sections; he really comes alive when he’s channeling that goofy 12-year-old, playing games and climbing trees with Hassan. Did we mention he never leaves the stage through any of this? The big kite-fighting tournament; an unspeakable act of bullying and cowardice; a life-changing riff between Amir and Hassan; the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; Amir’s and Baba’s arrivals at a Pakistan refugee camp; their applications for asylum in America and arrival in San Francisco; Baba’s worship of the vocally anti-Russia Ronald Reagan (cue audience applause); Amir’s matriculation at San Jose State; their setup at a local flea market, where Amir meets Soraya; a phone call from Baba’s oldest friend, Rahim Khan (Dariush Kashani); Amir’s 2001 trip to Pakistan to see him, and a subsequent trip back to an unrecognizable Kabul… that’s a lot to cover in two hours and 40 minutes. You can practically hear the pages turning from scene to scene.
Director Giles Croft, who also helmed the hit U.K. production, moves things along rather well on a smartly sparse set (carpets and crates are just about the only adornments you’ll spot). And the gifted tabla artist Salar Nader, onstage throughout the entire show, provides dramatic accompaniment in just the right spots.
One curious directorial choice: The second act features a silhouetted reenactment of a cold-blooded killing behind a curtain, which produces an incongruous puppet-show effect. Perhaps it’s an effort to interrupt the constant, sometimes draggy, narration, but in that case, telling us that the Taliban shot someone in the back of the head in the street would be dramatic enough.
The Kite Runner opened July 21, 2022, and runs through Oct. 30 at the Hayes Theater. Tickets and information: thekiterunnerbroadway.com
