Photo via Capital Fringe.
By DCist contributor Seth Rose
Reminds us of:: 30 Rock and Entourage plus Afghanistan, but minus the charm of either
Flop, Fine or Fringe-tastic? Flop.
The Real World: Kabul has a profound identity crisis at its core. The show tries to tell a simple story about American writers filtered through the unusual setting of war-torn Kabul, but the setting barely gets any worthwhile attention, and the story is not nearly interesting enough to make up for this gap.
That story concerns three American soap opera writers (Simone Lewis, Bryan Norrington, and Mo O’Rourke) hired by an Afghani TV company to write for their new satellite TV network, and the professional and interpersonal troubles they encounter. And…that’s essentially all there is to it. They’re in one of the more intriguing, dynamic, and dangerous settings in the modern world, and this show chooses instead to focus on a group of soap opera writers squabbling over not finishing their script in time. It hardly seems to matter who that script is being written for. Meanwhile, the Afghani characters Mr. Abdul (Omar Rocha) and his assistant Mehri (Nina Marti) get barely any stage time beyond feeding the Americans exposition and acting as implicit targets for jokes that are offensive and uninspired; at one point, Mehri mentions Who Wants to Marry an Opium Farmer? as a popular Afghani TV show. The final few scenes briefly tackle the regional issues more directly, but by then the effort represents a whiplash-inducing tonal shift that extends to an abrupt downbeat ending.
All this can’t help but raise the question: Why Kabul? Why go through the trouble of putting a show in an unconventional setting that has barely been explored by American theater if you are not going to put in the effort to actually do any of that exploration? There’s a lot of room in the premise to answer some interesting questions: How do American writers largely ignorant of a culture write for millions of its members? How do Afghanis like Mehri interact with sprawling American capitalist enterprises, and what is the cost of those interactions? Is there even a worthwhile place for American TV culture in a country recently and currently ravaged by civil war? The Real World: Kabul isn’t interested in answering any of these questions, and whatever it is interested in doing is not worth the price of admission.
The Real World: Kabul is playing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center: Lab II on July 16 at 10:45 p.m., July 20th at 6:15 p.m. and July 22 at 10 p.m.
