Bridge of art
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Afghan News Network 28 January 2004
An American writer has presented a play exploring Afghanistan's brutal political culture
to some of its top actors, hoping to inspire a production on Kabul's war-battered stages and raise funds for Afghan orphans.
Emmy-winning playwright William Mastrosimone donated a script of "The Afghan Women" at the Soviet-era headquarters of Afghanistan's state television company.
Actors of all ages crowded in into a room to hear Mastrosimone urge them to stage the work - and raise the prospect of a tour to the United States if it also gets an airing on Broadway.
"The message of the play is very strongly pro-democratic," Mastrosimone told the circle of expectant faces, saying he wanted to create "a bridge of art" between Afghans and Americans.
Mastrosimone, who spent a few weeks in Afghanistan in 1981 with Mujahadeen rebels fighting the Soviet occupation, has set his play in the time after U.S. military might ousted the Taliban two years ago.
Its hero is an Afghan woman who flees the earlier fighting, but returns from the United States after the fall of the hardline Islamic regime to found an orphanage.
She ends up killing a warlord who tries to use the kids as a human shield as he retreats from a failed coup attempt in Kabul _ and inspiring the warlord's vengeful son to turn away from violence.
Mastrosimone, a 56-year-old from Trenton, N.J., said the play was only available in the United States to theater groups who pledged to run it as a fund-raiser for a California-based charity supporting orphanages in three Afghan cities.
The play premiered last year at the Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton, the first of a dozen performances in small amateur theaters that raised $10,000, a sum he said would rocket if his search for a Broadway showing succeeds.
Showing it in Afghanistan, where armed faction leaders still dominate, would have a different value.
"I think it's dangerous," he said. "It's about the murder of a warlord."
First, though, it has to find a functioning theater.
Kabul's main playhouse, The Kabul Theater, was destroyed along with most of capital during the 1992-96 civil war, when the Mujahadeen warlords turned on each other after the Soviet withdrawal.
Recently, offices and rehearsal rooms have been repaired and re-equipped one at a time with donations from countries including Norway.
But Afghan actors - and hardy audiences - say they have only been able to use the main stage in the summer because the bomb damage has left it with neither a roof nor seating.
Mastrosimone said a brief encounter with its director, Gull Makai Shah, left him convinced the play would go ahead once it is has been translated: "She's seen theater in New York and London. It'll have a high standard."
The stage would in any case be best lit with flaming torches, he said, making the best of the city's regular blackouts.
Kabul's dramatic community also appeared keen, jostling for places in a photo-shoot with their surprise visitor and beaming at his suggestion that the six to be selected might end up touring the United States.
"I would like to see the difference between the way they work and we work," said Anisa Wahab, a diminutive 37-year-old angling for one of the four female roles. "And I want to see America."
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