Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013, and although it is a “one-act” play, it is quite the cultural collision course, with the characters volleying back and forth with their discontents and their veiled and not-so-veiled resentments and prejudices.
Expertly directed by Jennifer Decker, the Artistic Director of Mildred’s Umbrella Theater Company, this riveting drama forces the audience to watch the messier aspects of multiculturalism and the lip service paid to the ideas of equity and inclusion. These are couched as injustices one minute, but then are flipped and the audience may not be so sure as more information is revealed. In addition, Akhtar goes beyond the professional world (don’t worry—it’s still front and center) to the personal world, and that is when things, believe it or not, get even more destructive.
How many plays address issues of identity and belonging? Well, almost all of them. But this one takes those categories and puts them on steroids. It also subverts most notions of “The American Dream.” Apparently, you can live in Manhattan, make a ton of dough being a lawyer or an artist or arts curator, and still be filled with fear and loathing for oneself and others. It is hard not to marvel at how this play packs all of this in with a ruthless efficiency, believable but difficult dialogue, and a searing critique of the romanticizing of cultural “assimilation,” from doctoring one’s identity to fit in, to the dramatic irony of Amir critiquing Islam in a way that makes him seem Islamophobic to other characters.
The issues in this play hit three big buckets of awkward: race, religion, and gender. It dramatizes and seems to suggest that only an “us and them” mentality can translate into survival in American culture, whether you are liberal or conservative, from the Occident or the Orient, male or female. The play is both retro (alluding to has-been politicians such as Michele Bachmann to long-known and discussed literary critics such as Edward Said and his books on “Orientalism”—as if only one culture is guilty of bias) and edgy, throwing ethnic hatred and faux liberalism in the faces of the audience in rapid fire fashion.
Weirdly, none of the characters come off well—and maybe that is Akhtar’s point: humans are prejudiced, and it might be socialization, it might be “in the bones,” but it is what it is and ever shall be.
One cannot help but practice the intentional fallacy here: what does Akhtar intend to convey? Certainly, the profound ambivalence we can all hold toward our own cultural heritage. But on the other hand, not one character on the stage has to participate in whatever they have signed up for. There are other paths than the New York City hustle—it’s America, right? Regardless, he has created unforgettable characters, and he does not seem to favor any of the cultural heritages represented, including Islam, which receives a lot of heavy critique in the drama.
But what a cast carrying so much politesse and vitriol! Ninaad Vaidya is a believable Amir, a successful attorney who has rejected Islam, but makes a pivotal mistake at the urgings of his wife to support an imprisoned Imam that will have huge consequences for his life. Emily his wife (Adina Opalek) is a naïve and irritating “more liberal than thou” artist who romanticizes the culture her husband rejects, using Islam as the basis for her art. She hardly ever knows what she is really talking about, but boy, is she earnest.
Abe (a convincing Khurram Hamid) is Amir’s nephew, who identifies more as a member of his religion and displays an unsettling degree of anti-Americanism that concerns both Amir and Emily. But this is only after he has been on the swinging pendulum of Americanizing his name to defending an Imam that might be a criminal.
It’s a constant interplay between the cultures of one’s past and the present if you are from certain parts of the world. But Akhtar complicates every assumption you have about each character with each pivot of the plot: for example, Amir seems so self-possessed and mild-mannered, until he sympathizes with the 911 terrorists for a moment, and then is shockingly violent. Akhtar goes for the jugular suggesting that if you are betwixt and between two or more cultures, it is impossible to predict one’s loyalties, and this uncertainty bleeds into every category of life.
Caprice Carter as Jory, a successful African American attorney at Amir’s firm and wife to the art curator that is interested in Emily and her art, is terrific. Carter was excellent in the Ensemble Theatre’s production of The Bluest Eye, and here she is great with both her comedic timing as well as priceless expressions. She is politically liberal one moment, almost a reactionary conservative the next, and it is a marvel to watch her sarcastic banter with her husband, Isaac, in a wonderful performance by Christian Tannous.
Tannous is also the assistant director of this show, and plays a Jew who is critical of Israel, is kind of smarmy as an art curator, and has more interest in Emily than her Muslim inspired art. It is thrilling watching Carter and Tannous in their sometimes funny, sometimes acidic, back and forth.
All of the actors give strong performances with difficult subjects in a minimalist space of a small living room and a dinner table. But what an off-the-rails dinner party happens there! The portrait Emily is painting of her husband Amir opens the play, but she doesn’t get the irony (or any irony, as in her pontifications about a religion she knows very little about) that she is inspired by Velasquez in a Westernized rendition of her husband in a tuxedo. Likewise, at the end, Amir seems to understand how his wife sees him for the first time—a perfect bookending of the drama, and a reminder of how art infiltrates our perceptions of the life around us.
But the main accomplishment of this play involves both content and form: for every stereotype developed about each character and the cultural milieu they inhabit and the ethnic background that is their heritage, each character does something to confirm that stereotype in spite of building lives that are intended to defeat such stereotyping. Westerners get their “history” from South Park and Rumi, and it’s ridiculous, and Amir can’t seem to shake that situation no matter how much he explains that Islam is backward and brutal. At least that is what the play suggests at key moments.
This subversion and affirmation of stereotypes cannon be ignored—and that is the main reason to see this play and experience the discomforts such a rendering brings up. That said, Akhtar represents American culture as one where there are teams, and no matter who you are, you have to figure out who is “us,” and who is “them.”
It is perfect timing for Shunya Theatre to produce his work, as the playwright is also reading from his new novel, The Radiance, on Monday, October 5 at the Alley Theater as part of the Inprint Margaret Root Brown Reading Series.
Disgraced runs October 2, 3, 4, 9, 10 and 11 at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, see matchhouston.org or shunyatheatre.org. $35.00.