Review Roundup: SELLING KABUL at Playwrights Horizons

Read reviews for Selling Kabul, from Playwrights Horizons, starring Dario Ladani Sanchez as Taroon, Francis Benhamou as Leyla, Mattico David as Jawid, and Marjan Neshat as Afiya.

Taroon once served as an interpreter for the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Now it is 2013, and the Americans - and their promises of safety - have begun to withdraw. Taroon spends his days in hiding, a target of the increasingly powerful Taliban. On the eve of his son's birth, he must remain in his sister's apartment, or risk his life to see his child. With shattering precision, Sylvia Khoury's tense drama traces the human cost of U.S. immigration policy and the legacy of our longest war.

Learn more and purchase tickets at https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/plays/selling-kabul/.

See what the critics are saying!

---

Helen Shaw, Vulture: Sylvia Khoury's elegant new play Selling Kabul looks perfectly at home in this filmic space, using the compression of the tight frame to create a ratcheting sense of tension. Arnulfo Maldonado's hyperdetailed set of an apartment in Afghanistan is exactly realized: beige carpet, low ceiling, a plaster archway into a small, cluttered kitchen. Light streams in between slatted blinds, slicing the room into film noir stripes. Everything in the furniture-free room is beige or brown, but it's easy to imagine Khoury's psychological drama as a black-and-white thriller.

Alexis Soloski, The New York Times: Sylvia Khoury's "Selling Kabul," a 95-minute thriller that opened on Monday at Playwrights Horizons, is a play as tautly made as a military bed. You could bounce a quarter off it - or given its provenance, a five-afghani coin - and then throw yourself down to recover your nerves, which the drama will have absolutely mangled.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: Formally, Selling Kabul is a thriller that hews to the classical tragic unities: It takes place in 95 minutes of real time, in a single location, with many key events occurring offstage. This adds to the play's suspense, but the compression is not fully successful; credibility questions arise, and the pacing is sometimes at odds with the action. By the end, the play verges uncomfortably on melodrama. What it sometimes lacks in finesse, however, it arguably makes up in urgency. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in 2021 has been criticized on strategic grounds, but Selling Kabul stages the question in starkly human terms. So many people, there and here, are still waiting to get the message.

David Finkle, New York Stage Review: 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.)

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: That potential confusion helped me realize a limitation of Khoury's play - or, perhaps more accurately, a limitation in the audiences who will be watching it. That is why, as timely as the drama might be, I think it would be a mistake for theatergoers to rely on "Selling Kabul" as a source of information about Afghanistan or the U.S. involvement there. Rather, it is a twisty drama that benefits from a fine production directed by Tyne Rafaeli, in which a committed cast offers persuasive portraits of four characters trying to survive, each of whom is living with fear, anxiety, or guilt.

Christian Lewis, Theatrely: Selling Kabul concerns Taroon (Dario Ladani Sanchez), a man hiding out in his sister's apartment in Afghanistan in 2013; he acted as a translator for the Americans and now the Taliban are hunting him. Khoury's piece offers an experience we are rarely given, an insight into what it was like on the other side of America's longest war. In 2013 Obama announced he would be cutting the number of US troops in Afghanistan in half. At the time, this seemed like a positive step in slowly ending a never-ending conflict. However, Khoury reveals the human toll of that decision, which left many in Afghanistan in danger as the Talbian increased its presence.

To post a comment, you must register and login.