In a novel, you need such a narrator to help you visualize a story from start to finish. Arison’s voice is deep and rich you hang onto his every word. Fortunately, Arison is magnetic as Amir, his lanky frame and everyman energy making him an inherently sympathetic narrator (even when Amir does the unforgivable). Director Giles Croft (who has directed The Kite Runner in London) has Arison play Amir as a boy and an adult, which means Arison never leaves the stage throughout the play’s 2.5-hour running time. In adapting the story, Matthew Spangler turns The Kite Runner into a memory play: Amir as an adult tells his story to us, the audience, as a flashback. That guilt, and his eventual redemption, makes up the bulk of the play and the novel. But when Hassan is raped by a group of Pashtun boys, Amir chooses to runs away instead of helping his friend. Despite their differences, the two are best friends. The two are born only a year apart but have vastly different lives: Amir is rich and educated, Hassan is poor and illiterate Amir is the master, Hassan is the servant Amir is Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, while Hassan is Hazara, the minority group. It is set in Afghanistan and is about two friends, Amir (Amir Arison) and Hassan (Eric Sirakian). The Kite Runner is based on Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling 2003 novel of the same name.

This can be a metaphor for the play, which tries to soar beyond its origins as a novel, but remains steadfastly bound by its source material.

The actor valiantly tried to pull it up, but the kite refused to take flight, seemingly comfortable bobbing along at shoulder height. It hovered slightly, then dipped toward the ground. At my performance, one of the kites failed to sufficiently lift off above the actor’s head. In the first, the actors come out waving gauzy white fabric hanging from springy wire rods, giving the illusion of kites flying in the air. In The Kite Runner, kite flying factors in two pivotal scenes.

Onstage stands