Thanks to the likes of Robert Breen, and Mary Zimmerman, Chicago theater long has been famous for its dramatic interpretations of novels. The list is long: “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Accidental Tourist,” “As I Lay Dying,” “The Sunset Limited.” In all of the above, the central dramatic problem was how to deal with the need for narration, reflecting the fundamental way in which a dialog-dependent play differs from narrative fiction.
That legacy, at once local to Evanston and international of import, came into my head Wednesday night as I watched the touring production of “The Kite Runner,” a show I’d on Broadway in 2022. It’s a (non-musical) adaptation of the justly celebrated debut novel by the Afghan American writer Khaled Hosseini, a harrowing story of displacement and betrayal set in Kabul, Afghanistan, Pakistan and San Francisco. Hosseini had a lot to say about the fate of Afghanistan at the hands of the Soviets, the Americans and the Taliban, but the core of the book really is about how the Pashtun narrator, Amir, fails to prevent a sexual assault happening to his loyal and vulnerable Hazara friend Hassan, and how the narrator’s compounding guilt then comes to define much of the rest of his life.
“The Kite Runner” is a powerful work, widely assigned in schools and famous following the 2007 film of the same name, but I find Matthew Spangler’s adaptation disappointing mostly because huge chunks of the storytelling are confined to the narrati.