‘Selling Kabul’ a breathless thriller, meticulously rendered by Northlight

In many ways, Sylvia Khoury’s 2022 Pulitzer finalist “Selling Kabul” is a thriller of Hitchcockian, gnaw-your-nails off intensity. The playwright structured a breathless, airtight plot where every moment of dialogue — and even seemingly innocuous bits of sound design — fits precisely into an intricate, meticulously rendered puzzle that shocks and surprises right up until the last piece falls into place.

Running through Feb. 25 at Skokie’s Northlight Theatre, “Selling Kabul” is more than a rip-roaring one-act that will have your heart rate increasing until the final blackout. As it plays out in real time among four characters in a single room in Kabul, Khoury’s narrative canvas encompasses decades of war and three generations of an Afghani family trapped by it.

Directed with a sure hand by Hamid Dehghani, “Selling Kabul” is also a hard-charging, emotionally draining hour-and-a-half.

The time is 2013, in the wake of a major U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Taroon (Owais Ahmed) was a translator for the U.S. military, but he’s been in hiding for four months, living out of a closet at the Kabul apartment his sister Afiya (Aila Ayilam Peck) shares with her husband Jawid (Ahmad Kamal). He leaves the closet mostly to check his email, waiting in vain for the visa promised by the Americans he worked for.

Across the hall is Afiya’s loquacious cousin Leyla (Shadee Vossoughi) and her bawling new baby. Leyla doesn’t know where Taroon is, his location one of many devastating secrets family members are forced to keep from each other, opening rifts like raw wounds as the drama progresses.

When Taroon’s (offstage) wife gives birth in a Kabul hospital, the stakes in the apartment start spiking like a garden of knives.

Michael Brosilow

Khoury’s dialogue is subtly rich in no small part because its full context often isn’t revealed immediately. Small talk over tea seems like just that until a few scenes later, as Khoury gradually reveals a series of terrifying developments taking place offstage, casting previous conversations in harrowing new lights.

Small moments of sound design (unnerving work by Jeffrey Levin) turn out to be more than incidental atmospherics. A baby crying, the thrum of distant helicopters, whirring fans, traffic — all of it figures in the harrowing plot.

“Selling Kabul” demands the family at its core make morally impossible decisions, the wrenching choices apparent in everything from Taroon’s careful stitching on the Taliban uniforms that keep Jawid’s tailor shop in business to Afiya’s unyielding refusal to pick up the phone even though she knows it’s their mother, desperate for news of her new grandchild.

Khoury makes three generations of the family vivid, although we never see the eldest. Instead, Taroon and Afiya’s mother — and the devastating effect the country’s changing political tides had on women — is rendered in a brightly colored, 1970s-style maxi-dress found in the bottom of a mending basket, a garment that almost feels like a relic from another world.

We never see Taroon’s wife either, but the pieces of her story we learn speak volumes: She loved studying engineering, Taroon recalls proudly of their university days, until the women were pulled out of school. Leyla casually jokes that her infant boy is so active that “Honestly, sometimes I wish I’d had a girl.”

Peck renders Afiya a portrait in pragmatic stoicism, her terror and sheer exhaustion unmistakable in both her eyes and her swallowed screams.

Ahmed’s Taroon is a coiled wire, helpless as he waits on other people to determine how his life — if his life — will unfold. Vossoughi morphs from cheerful new mom and caring cousin into an abyss of sorrow and rage that evokes Greek tragedy. Kamal’s Jawid delivers a heartbreaking, climactic monologue that evokes the brutal transactions — global to personal — of Khoury’s title.

Michael Brosilow

The design work is richly detailed: David Arevelo’s costumes speak to the characters, Leyla’s bright, designer hijab contrasting with Afiya’s earth-colored garments, which seem designed to blend into their surroundings.

Set designer Joseph Johnson’s cozy, gorgeously carpeted apartment is both refuge and prison for the loving, tight-knit family within. For the audience, it’s a place where the fallout from the longest war in U.S. history transpires with a force that makes for gripping theater and enduring impact.

As for the two baby boys in the family, their futures ultimately are a source of both hope and fear in “Selling Kabul.”