Ayad Akhtar’s ‘Disgraced’ by Philadelphia Theatre Company (first review)

“If you absolutely can’t conceive of living without each other, by all means get married,” Dad advised. “Anything short of that, be very cautious.”

The characters in Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar’s insightful and compelling drama of ethnic relations, could be poster children for Dad’s precept: They’re talented young professionals of diverse backgrounds, honing their respective crafts and advancing their careers in that greatest of all melting pots, New York, where a striving millennial could be forgiven for pooh-poohing the outmoded bigotry of the past.

Who gave us Aristotle?

Amir (played by Pej Vahdat in the current Philadelphia Theatre Company production) is an assimilated mergers and acquisitions lawyer at a major firm; he obscures his Pakistani background because he has no use for Islam — “The Koran is about tribal life in the seventh century,” he explains dismissively; “You have to work real hard to root that shit out” — and also because it makes him uncomfortable among his mostly Jewish partners. When urged by his nephew (who has himself Americanized his name from Hussein to Abe) to defend an unjustly arrested radical imam, Amir resists for fear he’ll be lumped in with the radical Islamists himself. “What does any of this have to do with me?” he asks.

Amir’s white wife, Emily (Monette Magrath), conversely, is a painter establishing a unique artistic niche by drawing on the very Islamic culture that her husband despises. “The Muslims gave us Aristotle (in translation),” she insists. “We draw on the Greeks and the Romans, but Islam is part of who we are too.” Emily’s Jewish patron Isaac (Ben Graney), a curator, imagines himself promoting her as ”a young Western painter drawing on Islamic tradition…a rich heritage we can all draw from.”

Wait: It gets even more complicated. Isaac is married to Jory (Aimé Donna Kelly), a black lawyer who practices at Amir’s firm.

Surviving adultery

When these four characters gather for dinner at Amir and Emily’s Upper East Side apartment, the conversation is predictably witty and erudite, even as they intellectually analyze their differences. But inevitably — this is, after all, the theater — their ancient tribal enmities bubble to the surface with a vengeance. By the final curtain, Amir stands alone in his empty apartment: his furniture gone, his career ruined, and his marriage shattered by an act of adultery and his reaction to it.

It’s a devastating denouement to a work admirably performed by a credible cast under the always dependable direction of Mary B. Robinson. But it’s also a bit much. The playwright Akhtar astutely mines the power of ancient prejudices but overlooks the countervailing power of human resilience, and consequently his characters are too easily wrecked by the reverses they encounter.

Some people are destroyed by adversity, to be sure, but others are strengthened by it, regardless of race, creed, or nationality. (Some 60 percent of all married individuals in the U.S. will engage in infidelity at some point during their marriage.) A good therapist could probably sort out who and why. Come to think of it, many of the conflicts raised in Disgraced could be — and, in this upscale circle, probably would be — solved by a few sessions with a shrink. But that option doesn’t occur to these folks.

A real-life lawyer

It’s especially curious that two of Akhtar’s four principal characters are lawyers. After all, lawyers are essentially problem solvers, but Amir and Jory seem immobilized by the problems they confront. When Amir is passed over for a partnership at his firm, we are led to believe that his career has been destroyed. But what is a law firm? Ultimately, just a collection of attorneys who share resources and office space in order to practice their craft. If a firm’s environment is toxic, a qualified lawyer like Amir can usually thrive somewhere else.

As it happens, at the opening night of Disgraced I sat two seats away from E. Gerald Riesenbach, the current chairman of Philadelphia Theatre Company's board, who happily practiced law for many years at the formidable firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. When that legendary partnership began to implode under the nasty weight of office politics, Riesenbach left to practice just as happily for many more years at Cozen O’Connor, another huge Philadelphia law firm that did not even exist when Riesenbach began practicing. Had he been asked, I suspect that Jerry Riesenbach would have told Ayad Akhtar: Heavyweight lawyers know as well as anybody how to pick themselves up from the canvas and get on with their lives.

The great value in Disgraced lies in its ability to enable American Christians and Jews to empathize for 90 minutes or so with the angst of American Muslims today. But Akhtar’s play overlooks the upside of an open society like ours: the way it provides individuals the latitude to work out their problems. The devastated Amir at the final curtain might well be a stand-in for Akhtar himself, whose promising examination of the roots of Muslim rage somehow careens off the rails for his failure to grasp the flexible (and therefore often enduring) nature of individual human relationships.

For Naomi Orwin's review, click here.

For further thoughts by Dan Rottenberg on the issues of tolerance raised by the play, click here.

For Mark Cofta's review of the 2016 McCarter Theatre production, click here.

To read Carol Rocamora's review of the original 2012 Lincoln Center production, click here.