Broadway’s ‘Disgraced’ Is Raw, Blistering

What does Miss Manners say about how to ensure dinner conversations remain polite? Never bring up politics or religion. Thankfully, playwright Ayad Akhtar minds her no heed. Akhtar’s blistering Disgraced opened Thursday on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre with a punch and power that won it a Pulitzer Prize. Few playwrights are examining what Akhtar does, certainly not with his insightfulness, and his play is breathtaking — and not a little uncomfortable — to watch. In the best of ways. An excellent five-person cast led by Hari Dhillon — and beautifully directed by Kimberly Senior — starts the play with swagger and confidence, building to horrific exchanges in which they are at each other’s throats, and then ushering a fall, much like a Manhattan God of Carnage. The play by the author of American Dervish is similarly exploring the papered-over fault lines raging beneath even the pampered and polished. In this case, he’s looking at Islam, race, cultural appropriation, entitlement and determinism. The playwright sets things up with a few scenes and then lets everything explode at a dinner party in a swanky Upper East Side apartment. Things get heated. There is violence. No wonder the pork tenderloin is uneaten.