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

Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced is about what happens when people get down to the truths behind the roles we play to fit in. It’s a deeply disturbing look at how ancient hatreds still lie beneath the veneer of culture and success for which everyone strives.

Amir Kapoor (Pej Vahdat), a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, has Americanized his name and his life while his artist wife, Emily (Monette Magrath), wants to incorporate Islamic tiling traditions in her art. Amir dresses in $600 Charvet shirts and lies about his origins, while Emily believes she understands Islam better than her husband.

Enter Isaac (Ben Graney), a Whitney Museum curator interested in Emily’s art — and a Jew, married to Jory (Aimé Donna Kelly), a black corporate lawyer who works with Amir. Put pork tenderloin on the dinner menu and the table is set for disaster.

Verbal, then physical, violence

A polite dinner party devolves into verbal fisticuffs, and then disintegrates into actual violence. The play demands that we take note, thoughts flying at each other, but leaves an emotional hole. Everyone is a bit too well-behaved, until the wife-beating — and then there is no going back. The final speeches end in confusion rather than greater understanding or potential solutions. The wife apologizes for her part in being beaten, and everything seems the same.

The set, by Jason Simms, is an upscale apartment in Manhattan, dominated by a large mandala-like painting in blue and turquoise — Emily’s Islamist-themed work. My companion said it reminded her of a dartboard, an appropriate metaphor for the barbs the characters hurl at each other.

“You people are animals,” they each say to the other. Except for Emily. She represents what each of them wants to emulate or possess, and so, perhaps, they need to destroy her. “You’re the slave who has the master’s wife,” Isaac tells Amir. Emily has even painted him as the Moorish slave in Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja, failing to understand the symbolism of what she has done.

But does Emily represent what they really want — someone not burdened by ethnic traditions and histories of subjugation? Just as she romanticizes the Koran, which Amir describes as a “hate mail letter to humanity,” so, perhaps, they have romanticized her. But even Emily is not content with who she is: She delves into other traditions, imagining they offer her inspiration, but she never goes deep enough to understand what it means to be considered “the other.”

Don’t let me be misunderstood

The play hinges on a misunderstanding: Because of a newspaper article, Amir is seen by others as supporting a supposedly terrorist imam, a position he was pushed into by Emily and his cousin Abe (originally Hussein), played by Anthony Mustafa Adair. The ensuing outcry — Amir is pushed out of his job — leaves everyone wondering who they really are. Does Amir identify as Muslim or American? Where do his loyalties lie? Can Abe sustain denying his heritage, or is he just fooling himself? As Amir dismantles the life he had once created, Emily begins to understand her naiveté in thinking that differences will go away if they are overlooked.

We need to be able to talk honestly to each other. Whether the subject is womb politics or ethnic origins, we are so careful not to risk offending someone’s sensibilities that we have little chance of understanding each other. We each play a role of someone who belongs, choosing our circle of friends so we have a place where we fit in. But like Amir and Abe, we can maintain those fictions for just so long, and then the lessons we were taught in childhood come back to challenge who we are today. Can we ever really change?

Hopefully the answer is yes. And yet, in this play, when his marriage is threatened, this civilized man does what men have done for far too long — he beats his wife. And she apologizes. And nothing changes.

You can read Dan Rottenberg’s review here.

To read 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.