At what point does a genuine villain become a Grand Guignol trope? From World War II onward, Nazis were that convenient bad guy whenever writers of fiction needed to shock us with senseless and morally unhinged violence. Was Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film, “The Night Porter,” starring Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, the exploitive turning point when real shock over the actions of the Nazis turned to mere titillation in the depiction of a sexual relationship between a former concentration-camp officer and one of his prisoners?
The Taliban are the new Nazis, not that the latter has gone away, unfortunately. The Afghan terrorists figure prominently in Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, “The Kite Runner,” published in 2003. A film version followed four years later, and in 2009, Matthew Spangler’s play “The Kite Runner” had its world premiere at the San Jose Repertory Theater. That stage adaptation traveled to the U.K., where Giles Croft directed it at the Nottingham Playhouse and the Liverpool Playhouse, with a stop in between on the West End. Croft now brings his staging of Spangler’s “Kite Runner” to Broadway, where it opened Thursday at the Helen Hayes Theater.
Spangler’s stage adaptation is no “Night Porter.” Then again, it is no “Schindler’s List” or “The Damned” either. At the core of “The Kite Runner” is a case of hidden paternity, the kind that is best left to comedies written in another century.
That central plot point aside, Spangler’s writing relies on the unconscionable horrors of the Taliban to keep us engaged. In Act 1, a young boy (Eric Sirakian) is raped by a future leader (Amir Malaklou) of the Taliban. And in Act 2, in a way that only pulp fiction can deliver such a neat confluence of characters and events, this bad guy returns years later to brutalize not only the boy’s son (the double-cast Sirakian) but his savior-protector Amir (Amir Arison), who has been narrating the play.
Leading up to the rape, Amir’s narration is so extensive that the show takes on a Cliff’s Notes quality regarding its source material. Croft’s direction distracts with a tabla player placed downstage to underscore the spoken words. Arison is not an engaging storyteller. Neither is he convincing as a young boy, although in the beginning, he doesn’t resort to vocal tricks to signal his character’s various states of emotional distress. Those mannerisms come later and completely flood Act 2, after Croft has hit us with every visual cliché to telegraph that we’re either in San Francisco or Kabul.
Sirakian manages to be far more understated, especially in his role as the imprisoned son. He provides a quiet gravitas to a production that is otherwise in dire need of it.
Amir’s father is written to be a villain almost as extreme as any member of the Taliban, and Faran Tahir shouts every fourth or fifth word to emphasize Baba’s badness. It’s a vocal mannerism that is picked up by Houshang Touzie in the role of Amir’s boorish father-in-law. The two dads don’t cross paths, but a curious subtext enters the story: Is Amir willing his father back to life just to punish himself for all his past sins?
Playing Amir’s wife, Azita Ghanizada is wise not to embellish on what is a complete cipher of a role.
