For a relatively short novel, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia is a big and unwieldy ... family life in the 1970s suburbs to the London stage, and then to the druggy excess of New York.

Despite the material being set in the 1970s, "The Buddha of Suburbia" stage adaptation has a contemporaneous feel to it. Rice said that her initial idea was to begin the play when Karim is in the ...