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."
Timely dramas on Broadway are in very short supply, and that alone makes the bow of Disgraced an event worth applauding...The play has lost its essential velocity in the move from Lincoln Center Theater, where Amir was played with a thousand volts of electricity by Aasif Mandvi...On the stage of the tiny Claire Tow Theater, Mandvi seemed ready to explode at any second. Dhillon is clearly a skilled actor, but his Amir doesn't fibrillate with the pent-up anger the character needs if he is to be credible. This may have something to do, as well, with the ciphered performance by Mol, who seems to be sleepwalking through the show. She's out of her league on the Broadway stage, and you can sense from the other actors that she's giving them nothing to work with. The dazzler in this production, staged again by Kimberly Senior, is Pittman, taut and almost serenely tough...It still raises deeply discomfiting questions. But this little off-Broadway potboiler has reduced to a simmer in the move to Times Square.
In truth, this is a superior production to the one that opened at Lincoln Center in 2012, with a more charismatic cast and a better sense of the rising ideological stakes. In the lead role of proudly assimilated lawyer Amir Kapoor, Hari Dhillon cuts a handsome, graceful figure...He has an easy chemistry with his pretty wife, Emily (Gretchen Mol), an artist whose recent work is influenced by Islamic ornamentation. The plot is mainly a vehicle getting its characters to a place where they show the cracks within carefully constructed social attitudes of worldliness or multiculti tolerance...Akhtar may not have revolutionary things to say about poorly repressed animosities between East and West, but he says them eloquently and passionately. Now that the context has changed, maybe I'm listening more closely.
| 2012 | Off-Broadway |
Lincoln Center Theater LCT3 Production Off-Broadway |
| 2014 | Broadway |
Broadway Premiere Production Broadway |
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | Theatre World Awards | Theatre World Award | Karen Pittman |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Greenleaf Productions |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Ayad Akhtar |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Rachel Weinstein |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Alden Bergson |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | The David Merrick Arts Foundation |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | The Shubert Organization |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Jere Harris |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Darren DeVerna |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | TNTDynaMite Productions |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Ashley DeSimone |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Carl Levin |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Jonathan Reinis |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Jessica Genick |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Tulchin/Bartner Productions |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Stephanie P. McClelland |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Rodger Hess |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Richard Winkler |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Amanda Watkins |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Jenifer Evans |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Lincoln Center Theater |
| 2015 | Tony Awards | Best Play | The Araca Group |
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