Disgraced

It's an interesting coincidence that I saw Disgraced, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Ayad Akhtar, at the Lyceum Theater last night on the heels of the controversy about the debate on Islam between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck. Even liberal lions like Maher are now taking a dim view of Islam, lashing out at the violent tendencies of the religion. Unlike conservatives, who agree with Maher on that point, Maher is dismissive of all religions.

Akhtar's play is about a man of  Pakistani descent, born Muslim, who has basically renounced his religion and has become comfortable living in the Western world. Amir Kapoor, born in the United States, is an extremely successful corporate lawyer, married to a blonde American woman. In the first scene, he outlines his beef with Islam to his nephew, who wants him to help defend an Imam imprisoned on suspicion of raising money for Hamas. Amir tells the boy that of an incident involving a Jewish school friend, and how he has no wish to revert back to being devout.

To placate his nephew and his wife, Emily, who is an artist fascinated by Islamic culture, Amir does attend a hearing for the Imam, and gets his name in the paper, along with the name of his heavily Jewish firm. This leads to friction at work, where the partners discover that he was born with the name Abdullah, not Kapoor. That evening is a dinner party, which will be the heart of the play, in which Amir's co-worker, Jory, and her husband, Isaac, a Jewish art curator. As one can imagine, fireworks erupt.

This is heady play, with extremely pungent dialogue. It does have a wee bit of contrivance--after all, the dinner party has a Muslim, a white Protestant, a Jew, and an African-American, hitting all the quadrants. That sounds like a playwriting exercise (or the set up for a joke), but Akhtar walks the tightrope of staginess well, never slipping into overt preachiness.

Akhtar, who is a Muslim, gives Amir numerous speeches of his distaste for the religion of his birth, and then has the white and Jewish characters trying to defend it, turning things on their head. He points out that Islam itself means "submission," and that according the Quran, art is not valued, and that it was written as a guide for behavior in the seventh century, so that fundamentalist groups are trying to turn the clock back. He also points out that Quran accepts wife-beating, a point that will resonate later in the play,

But, on the other hand, Amir can't get the Muslim out of his bones. In some very incendiary dialogue, he remembers that though horrified by 9/11, he couldn't help but feel a blush of pride, which disgusts him.

The dinner party ends with two secrets revealed, one of which is a bit of a cliche that I could see coming, and Amir's life spirals out of control. It's an interesting commentary on a man trying to escape his upbringing, which may well be impossible.

The play was directed crisply by Kimberly Senior, after productions in Chicago, Lincoln Center, and London. I read the script on the train ride home and was interested to note differences between the published version and the Broadway version. Nothing major, but for a playwright it's interesting to note word changes. For example, Amir talks of when a school girl he had a crush on left for a week on vacation, it changes from "I was a mess," to "I was abject." The latter is far more pretentious, I guess. Amir is not an easy guy to like even at the beginning of the play, and it doesn't get better for him.

Amir is played by Hari Dhillon, who captures that obnoxious glibness very well. One scene that was added to this production is after he snaps at his nephew (played by Danny Ashok) and then embraces him and apologizes to him. Those few lines gave the character some much needed humanizing.

As Emily, Gretchen Mol is willowy and almost translucent in her whiteness. As a mixed race couple it's easy to assume that Amir is the one with a fetish for the exotic, but it's clear that Mol's interest in Islamic art may have led her to Amir. Josh Radnor is Isaac, and he has fun with the some of the Jewish humor lines, such as when he finds a copy of The Denial of Death in the Kapoor's apartment and points out that it was a book Woody Allen gives to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Karen Pittman, as Jory, I found a little more strident than perhaps necessary, but then she is playing a woman who rose out of the ghetto to become a high-powered lawyer.

With all of the jukebox shows and light comedies found on Broadway, it's lovely to know that intelligent works like this have a home on the Great White Way. The theater was filled, and the audience seemed to be paying rapt attention. Disgraced is an excellent work, much recommended.