Chicago's brilliant son: in his new production of Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul, director Frank Galati conjures Afghanistan from his longtime home in the Windy City.

When it comes to conveying what major political events cost ordinary people, few theatrical talents can top Frank Galati. Despite his longtime residence in Chicago, Galati may be best known for his work on Broadway, where in the 1990s he steered Ragtime and his own adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath to lasting acclaim.

"The theater," Galati says, "always has been deeply social and political." Certainly that's true of the newly updated version of 2001's Homebody/Kabul that Galati is now directing at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre. The production, which opened Jiffy 10, gave Galati the chance to collaborate for the first time with another great gay political voice of the theater. Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright Tony Kushner.

Galati sees a parallel between this play and Tony award-winners Grapes and Ragtime, which were "monumental experiences" about American families torn apart by turbulent forces of history. "Homebody/Kabul," he says, "has a similar kind of dynamic: a family--this time, a British family--working out its own sorrows and griefs and problems against a historical background of enormous, panoramic proportions."

Homebody, however, carries a unique cultural weight because of its setting in Afghanistan and the inadvertently eerie timing of its debut in December 2001. Kushner's first major work since Angels in America, Homebody took shape in the late '90s--but its off-Broadway premiere drew the astonished attention of a post-9/11 nation. Playing in a city still reeling from terrorist attacks, Homebody both impressed and unnerved people with its prescient statement that the Taliban would come to New York.

"If you write about current events, your writing will at some point probably be current, quips Kushner, who's weary of the notion that he predicted a threat where others couldn't. "I don't understand the notion that I had ESP. That's people reassuring themselves that the problem was that they don't have ESP and not just that they weren't reading the newspaper closely enough."

Since that initial run, Kushner has continued to revise the play, as he often does with his work. After talking to Galati--"He was on a short list of directors I admired enormously," Kushner says--the playwright visited Chicago earlier this year to reshape the script with the Steppenwolf team. Though they initially made radical changes, cutting entire scenes and characters, Kushner and Galati eventually restored Homebody to its original length of 3 1/2 hours.

"The play isn't really shorter than it was, but it is reshaped," Galati says.

Kushner agrees. "I think everybody, including Frank, feels we're [finished] with the script," he says.

Following the Chicago run, which concludes August 31, Galati will take Homebody to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where it opens September 21. Officially, no plans exist beyond that, but both artists have their eyes on Broadway. "The play deserves to have a very vigorous life," Galati says. "It deserves to be seen in its revised form because I think it really is becoming what it wants to be. It has found its internal structure. And it deserves to go back to New York."

Despite his high-profile career--two Tonys for the 1990 Broadway production of Grapes and another nomination for 1998's Ragtime, plus an Oscar nomination for coadapting the 1988 film The Accidental Tourist--Galati insists that he's never wanted to live anywhere but Chicago. "It's such a tremendously stimulating environment," he says.

Born in Chicago's suburbs, the 59-year-old Galati never truly left. For 17 years he has been affiliated with not one but two of America's greatest regional theaters, the Steppenwolf--where Gropes originated in 1988 and where Galati has also acted in such plays as 2001's The Drawer Boy, pictured above--and the Goodman, also in Chicago. "I feel so blessed, so fortunate," he says. "I could never have had this range of experience as a theater artist [if l lived] in New York."

While pursuing his doctorate in performance studies at Northwestern University, he also pursued his lifelong love. "I met my partner, Peter Amster, in 1970," he says. "We'll be together 33 years in November. We're very proud and happy."

What is it about the theater world that attracts so many gay artists--like him, like Kushner? The writer-director takes time to choose his words. "Is it that we like to dress up and put on makeup and dance and prance around? Is it that we like to make firmly voices and faces? Is it that we like to look at ourselves?" he muses. "I don't know."

Like one of his heroes, Gertrude Stein, Galati continues his thoughts in a poetry of repetition: "It's a mystery. It's a mystery in me. I feel the mystery in me. I feel I have a femaleness in me; I have a maleness in me. My gayness is an absolute, inextricable part of my persona and my art. But that's because sexuality is for anyone."

Behrens contributes to the Chicago Tribune and to gay papers nationwide.