The Kite Runner
Helen Hayes Theater, New York City ★★★★
You have to feel sorry for Amir Arison, said Naveen Kumar in NYMag.com. In the dreary new Broadway adaptation of
The Kite Runner, a runaway 2003 bestseller, the veteran TV actor is asked to play a “hard to forgive” protagonist in both middle age and at 12. Because playwright Matthew Spangler didn’t figure out a way to dramatize key moments in novelist Khaled Hosseini’s story, Arison also has to narrate much of the action. The star “makes a valiant effort,” repeatedly shapeshifting to show us how, as a privileged Afghani boy growing up in Kabul, he developed a close friendship with a household servant his age but then failed to act as his friend, Hassan, was violently assaulted. Unfortunately, Arison’s Amir remains selfcentered in adulthood, and the play tracks the novel so closely that it’s “more of a vivid recitation than fully realized drama.”
“Unsurprisingly, the most memorable image in The Kite Runner is the kites,” said Maya Phillips in The New York Times. As boys, Amir and Hassan partnered to compete in a kite-fighting tradition, and the play recreates those memories by putting birdlike kites on small sticks that the actors swing above their heads. “If only the rest of this stiff production exuded such elegance.” Instead, almost nothing else works, as the script’s weaknesses build upon an “emotionally pandering” novel that asks us to root for Amir’s redemption. Granted, the fact that a story about the struggles of Afghans is on Broadway is “a feat in itself.” Still, “there are more compelling ways to tell a story” than to ask that we lend our hearts—and two-plus hours of our time—to “a cowardly, insecure boy who becomes a cowardly, insecure man.”