DISGRACED is the story of a successful Muslim-American attorney who has renounced his religion and secured a coveted piece of the American Dream. Living high above Manhattan's Upper East Side, he and his artist wife host an intimate dinner party that is about to explode. Witty banter turns to vicious debate, and with each cocktail comes a startling new confession, painting an unforgettable portrait of our perception of race and religion.
Reviewing DISGRACED at LCT3 for The New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote:
"This rollicking new play by Ayad Akhtar is a continuously engaging, vitally engaged play about thorny questions of identity and religion in the contemporary world. The dialogue bristles with wit and intelligence. Mr. Akhtar puts contemporary attitudes toward religion under a microscope, revealing how tenuous self-image can be for people born into one way of being who have embraced another."
This bigger, more glamorous Broadway version exposes more faults and infelicities, but also strips away one's liberal pieties more effectively. Perhaps Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize not so much for drama as for bravery...Akhbar's craft is such that, amid the rubble of his argument, the questions -- and they are important ones, worth asking on Broadway -- survive. Perhaps, after all, the argument was just a house for the questions, and not, as is more typical, vice versa...In general, though, the Broadway resizing and recasting does not work to the play's advantage. Kimberly Senior's direction grows stronger as the play proceeds, but nearly derails the story at the start, with confusing staging and flaccid pacing. And though Hari Dhillon is riveting in his unraveling, he does not make us understand, as the charming Aasif Mandvi did Off Broadway, what was so delightful about Amir before the trouble began.
'Disgraced,' which races by in less than 90 minutes, is not a comforting play. It forces us to reflect on who we are, and what we really think about the guy with the different race, religion or ethnicity who lives next door.
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