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    Review: ‘The Kite Runner’ Trips From Page to Stage

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    Amir Arison stars as a guilt-ridden Afghan refugee brooding over a childhood friendship in a stiff adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel.Unsurprisingly, the most memorable image in “The Kite Runner,” which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Thursday night, is of the kites. They’re miniature, attached to thin poles that several actors wave, white tissue-paper flitting, birdlike, over their heads. The paper crinkles as the kites part the air with a soft swish.If only the rest of this stiff production, adapted by Matthew Spangler from the popular 2003 novel by Khaled Hosseini, exuded such elegance.A redemption story about an unlikable — sometimes downright despicable — protagonist, “The Kite Runner” opens in 2001, with Amir (Amir Arison), a Pashtun Afghan who explains that a cowardly decision he made at 12 years old shaped the person he is today.He doesn’t tell us what it was immediately; he steps back in time to show us scenes of his life in Kabul, with his single father, Baba (Faran Tahir); their servant Ali (Evan Zes), a member of the oppressed and harassed Hazara minority group; and Ali’s son, Hassan (Eric Sirakian). The rest of the cast of 13 fills in as other figures in Amir’s life, including his future wife, Russian soldiers, and various nameless characters from the Afghan community on both sides of the world.Arison (who plays the preteen Amir as well throughout) reads to the illiterate Hassan, though not without mocking him for it. He lets Hassan take the fall when they get in trouble. Yet Hassan faithfully partners with Amir in a competitive game where kite owners maneuver and use coated or sharpened strings to cut their competitors out of the sky; runners chase and catch the fallen kites as a prize.Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.When Amir fails to stop an act of violence against Hassan, the boys’ friendship is irreparably damaged. Hassan never truly leaves Amir, though; he carries the guilt to America, to which he and Baba escape after Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan ushers in the vicious regime of the Taliban. After finding love and a successful career, Amir eventually returns to his homeland to redeem himself from his past transgressions.“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, and went on to play throughout England, eventually on the West End. For the Broadway engagement, producers turned to Arison, an Off Broadway regular who had a supporting role for nearly a decade on NBC’s “The Blacklist.”Under Giles Croft’s direction, Arison’s Broadway debut proves spotty. He recites his opening lines with the stiffness of a child delivering a book report, and never totally eases into the role.The part would be tough work for any actor; Amir is onstage for the entire show, and the transitions between his middle-aged and younger selves, some three decades apart, require the kind of gymnastics that not every performer can stick.Not to mention the challenge of the character himself: a cowardly, insecure boy who becomes a cowardly, insecure man despite a childhood bolstered by the unfaltering love and loyalty of his friend Hassan, played with heartbreaking innocence by Sirakian.Eric Sirakian (in red) is heartbreaking as the childhood friend of Arison’s Amir in the play, which Matthew Spangler adapted from the novel.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesIt’s easier in the novel to ride the twists and turns of Amir’s journey, even as he leaves Hassan behind in the first third of the story. Onstage the play shuffles along, and it’s hard to stay invested in this unpalatable hero with Hassan in the rearview mirror.For those who haven’t read “The Kite Runner” or seen the 2007 film, I won’t spoil the violent scene that causes the rift between the two friends, but it’s one that feels jarring in what otherwise reads like a tidy parable. Gasps of surprise from the audience signaled the sudden shock of real-world horror.Again, part of that isn’t negotiable, since the emotionally pandering novel is the show’s DNA. But Croft’s mechanical direction often plays up the pathos, as when a character dies too dramatically, or in a scene where Amir prays for a loved one to be spared. Then there’s the phlegm-inducing serving of cheese, when Amir finds himself in 1981 San Francisco: Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” plays as characters in gaudy ’80s duds traipse across the stage throwing out random decade-appropriate nouns like “Prince,” “Pac-Man” and “Darth Vader.”For “The Kite Runner” to work, the boys’ nemesis needs to be formidable, but Spangler’s script diminishes Assef (Amir Malaklou), the childhood bully. He is no longer the novel’s sociopathic neo-Nazi, but more of an antagonist from an after-school special — with a shaky accent.Speaking of shaky, Barney George’s set design — which includes a stage-length vert ramp seemingly borrowed from a skate park and jagged rectangular panels lined up along the back wall — is frustratingly ambiguous. Two giant fabric sails occasionally descend from on high, resembling wings of a kite, but they are mostly distracting.William Simpson’s projection design provides a dose of whimsy, however, the watercolor renderings of a kite-filled sky or a pomegranate tree lending a fanciful storybook quality to the script.Legitimacy is always a tricky question when it comes to productions about people of color. That a story about the struggles of Afghans over the course of nearly three decades is on Broadway is a feat in itself, as is the cast of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent.Chunks of dialogue are spoken in a Farsi dialect (all credit to the cultural adviser and script consultant Humaira Ghilzai) and much of the underscoring features the tuneful plinks and thumps of the tabla player Salar Nader, a steady presence on one side of the stage and one of the production’s gems. (Jonathan Girling wrote the evocative music.)Still, “The Kite Runner” is not nearly as rich as the spate of Off Broadway plays that have recently explored the individual and national losses faced by Iran and Afghanistan, including Sylvia Khoury’s “Selling Kabul” and Sanaz Toossi’s “English” and “Wish You Were Here.” As Off Broadway has often proved, there are more compelling ways to tell a story.The Kite Runner Through Oct. 30 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan; thekiterunnerbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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      A Chameleon Flies From ‘The Blacklist’ to ‘The Kite Runner’

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      After nine seasons on the NBC series, Amir Arison is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel.An early scene in the new Broadway play “The Kite Runner” is mostly spoken in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Farsi, though the action depicts a distinctly American art form.“This town ain’t big enough for the two of us!,” the 12-year-old Amir exclaims to his best friend, Hassan. The two boys, pretending to be cowboys, love American westerns, especially “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne. After a standoff, Hassan charges at Amir, but Amir trips him and Hassan stumbles and falls. They wrestle, tumbling and giggling — blissfully unaware of the dark forces that will soon tear them apart.The place is Kabul, the year is 1973 and the two actors playing the boys are actually adults. One of them, Amir Arison, 44, the veteran stage actor who recently left NBC’s hit series “The Blacklist” after nine seasons, portrays Amir as a young boy and an adult.The show, which is scheduled to begin previews on July 6 at the Helen Hayes Theater, is based on Khaled Hosseini’s popular 2003 novel of the same name. It tells the story of Amir, a privileged Pashtun boy growing up alongside Hassan, the Hazara son of his father’s servant. After a childhood act of cowardice, Amir spends most of the play reflecting on and trying to atone for his failure to come to the aid of his best friend.Arison, center, during rehearsals. He plays the protagonist, Amir, as both a child and an adult. Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn playing Amir as both a child and an adult, Arison jumps between acting out his childhood memories and narrating them from the present. He doesn’t leave the stage once.It may be a daunting part, but Arison, who cut his teeth on Off Broadway stages before appearing as an FBI counterterrorism expert in some 190 episodes of “The Blacklist,” is up for it.Over the years, he’s played a flashy Iraqi dermatologist in the documentary drama “Aftermath”; a mysterious newlywed in Christopher Durang’s dark comedy “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them”; and a government accountant in Stephen Belber’s “The Muscles in Our Toes,”Still, he said over lunch recently, this role is the biggest challenge of his professional and personal life. “In the theater, you cut a vein open,” he said. “You give your voice, your body, your mind and your soul.”Matthew Spangler, who adapted the story for the stage, said of the role: “It does raise the bar for that actor quite a bit, but then it becomes something truly virtuosic.”Reporting From AfghanistanInside the Fall of Kabul: ​The Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world. Our reporter and photographer witnessed it.On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul. Here is what they saw.Face to Face: ​​A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.While the casting director Laura Stanczyk and the cultural consultant Humaira Ghilzai ensured that Afghan actors auditioned (and that it was easy for them to do so), the role of Amir ultimately went to Arison, who is Israeli American. He grew up in Florida the son of Israeli immigrants; his mother was born in a refugee camp to Holocaust survivors.In March, when Arison landed the audition for Amir, his first call was to Ghilzai, whose family fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. He didn’t know of her affiliation with the show, but he had worked with her twice before — once for his role as a colonel in the Pakistani army in a West Coast production of J.T. Rogers’s “Blood and Gifts” — and asked for advice on his accent.Arison is a chameleon, Ghilzai said: He’s played Afghans, Arabs, Americans and “metamorphosizes into whatever you need him to be.”“The Kite Runner” was first staged in 2007 at San Jose State University, where Spangler teaches performance studies. Its first professional production took place in 2009, and it has since been staged in multiple countries. The Broadway production, directed by Giles Croft, is based on the version that ran at Nottingham Playhouse in 2013 and at Wyndham’s Theater in the West End three years later. (The play “mostly works on the level of childlike fable, satisfyingly schematic but frustratingly simplistic,” Stephen Dalton wrote in a Hollywood Reporter review.)The book — published two years after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban — has captivated millions of readers around the world. Now the play arrives on Broadway almost a year after the United States withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban seized power again.Hosseini’s tale gave readers a rare inside perspective on Afghanistan and the intricacies of life there, but it also has, as Arison pointed out, universal themes of immigration, power, redemption, and father and son relationships.Azita Ghanizada, who plays Amir’s wife, Soraya, with Arison.Nina Westervelt for The New York Times“The immigrant story never goes away,” Croft, the director, said in an interview. “Most of us have it in us somewhere. Even if we didn’t experience it ourselves, somewhere in our background, somebody will have traveled to get somewhere that they think will be better or safer. So we carry it with us.”As does Hosseini, whose family sought political asylum in the United States in 1980 after the Soviet army invaded the country, and told The Times last year that he still has “a perspective, and I do feel strongly about what’s going on in Afghanistan.” (In “The Kite Runner,” Amir and his father also escape Afghanistan — first to Pakistan, then to the United States.)Along with Arison, the cast has deep Middle Eastern and South Asian roots. Azita Ghanizada, who portrays Amir’s wife, Soraya, and Salar Nader, who plays the tabla onstage throughout the show, are both Afghan.“It’s been really heartening for me to see how devoted they are to representation,” Ghilzai, the cultural consultant, said of the cast members. “I think because their culture has been misrepresented so much that they really, really, really want to get it right.”Still, placing a non-Afghan in the central role was not a choice made lightly.“The thing that swung it for me,” Croft said of Arison’s casting, “was that he has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.”The director Giles Croft, left, said he cast Arison as Amir because he “has an inherent warmth and generosity and vulnerability — all of which are qualities that the character has.” Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn coaching the cast and creative team, Ghilzai guided actors through Dari pronunciations — including the names of characters and towns. The dialect is sprinkled throughout the script.One actor recently asked Ghilzai about Afghan body language: What should he do if he loses in a competition? She advised making a thumbs up motion, a Middle Eastern insult. (They later replaced it with a different gesture, so the meaning wouldn’t get lost in translation.)This production is Ghilzai’s first involvement as a consultant, and she worked closely with Spangler and Croft to re-evaluate the text. In a pivotal scene in the second act, Assef (Amir Malaklou), the neighborhood bully turned-Taliban member, taunts Amir, who has returned to Afghanistan from America.“But America’s not all bad,” Assef tells him. “You know who taught me how to use a Stinger missile? Your C.I.A.”The line emerged from conversations between Ghilzai, Spangler and Croft and was added for this production. It recognizes the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the militarization of various groups in Afghanistan.Arison, third from left, played an F.B.I. special agent on the NBC series “The Blacklist.”David Giesbrecht/NBCIn his last episode of “The Blacklist,” Arison’s quirky character Aram Mojtabai told his colleagues that he’s leaving the FBI and plans to move to New York, where among other things, he’d likely see “a Broadway show.” (The episode left open room for him to return.)On Twitter, the actor explained to fans that he was a big fan of Hosseini’s novel, had done his first play in second grade, and couldn’t pass up the lifetime dream to be on Broadway himself.While his part there is “the most unheroic hero you’ll ever see,” he said in the interview, he has come to see it as personally meaningful in ways he didn’t expect.At the beginning of the second act, Amir and his father are hidden inside a fuel truck, fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring Pakistan. Soviet soldiers stop the truck, and father and son don’t know if they’ll live or die.“The other day I just lost it because I thought of my grandparents — that’s what happened to them,” Arison said. “That’s another way I connect, even though I’m not Afghan.“So I’m hoping — and I think every audience should take what they want,” he added, that “through an individual story, we do not forget that history is repeating itself.” More