Disgraced Review

Ayad Akhtar’s topical play Disgraced, the worthy winner of last year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, continues a long tradition of theater that explores the costs of assimilation for minority groups in the great American melting pot. In this case, we get an engaging snapshot of the challenge for upwardly mobile Muslim Americans in the post-9/11 age. At the show’s center is Amir Kapoor (Hari Dhillon), a Pakistani-American mergers & acquisitions lawyer living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his blonde wife, Emily (Boardwalk Empire‘s Gretchen Mol). Amir is a man of complications and contradictions. He’s rejected his Muslim upbringing (and even his surname) to better blend into American society and get ahead at his law firm, but he still feels the occasional tug of his Islamic upbringing—if only to consciously reject it. And his wife, a painter who’s drawn to the rich traditions of Islamic art, nudges Amir to more openly embrace the heritage that serves as her artistic muse. But when she cajoles Amir into attending a hearing for his nephew’s imam, jailed on perhaps trumped-up charges of financing terrorist-supporting groups, the resulting publicity leads to sharp consequences—and his standing at his firm takes a serious nosedive. Akhtar piles on additional conflicts, both domestic and professional, culminating in a fraught dinner party with Emily’s Jewish art dealer, Isaac (How I Met Your Mother alum Josh Radnor), and Isaac’s African American wife, Jory (Karen Pittman), a lawyer in Amir’s firm who’s also vying for partnership. In another great theater tradition, tempers flare and people say things that they probably wish could be un-said.