Review: DISGRACED at Long Wharf Theatre

According to American Theatre magazine, DISGRACED tops the list of most frequently produced plays in the US for the current year. One polished production of this topical play opens the 51st season at Long Wharf Theatre, which still proudly inhabits a converted meat packing warehouse on the edge of New Haven.

The play takes place over a six month period in 2011-12, and is set in an upscale apartment in New York City, beautifully rendered with multicultural artistic touches by set designer Lee Savage. There's a glowing Islamic rosette, a silver Hindu statue, an African instrument. In the opening scene, a reproduction of the great Renaissance portrait by Velazquez of his slave and assistant Juan de Pareja, of Moorish descent, dominates center stage. DISGRACED, which won the Pulitzer in 2013, takes up the dynamics of cultural appropriation and the problematics of assimilation so central to our national character--both already provocatively embedded in that portrait from the 1600s.

At lights up, Emily is sketching her husband Amir, in preparation for an oil portrait modeled on the Velazquez. Emily (Nicole Lawrence) is white and blonde; she's drawn to the Velazquez piece in part because her own work uses Islamic forms. She's also married Amir (Rajesh Bose) who has risen from Pakistani Muslim origins to a high position at a prestigious law firm. While posing for her, he's on his cell phone, chewing out an underling in staccato, expletive-laced rhythms. He's dressed above the waist in a suit jacket and an expensive shirt but wears just boxers below.

How do we costume ourselves for public representation? For friends and lovers? What's essential to identity and what can be shed? Can we take on aspects of cultural heritages other than our own without exploitation? Playwright Ayad Akhtar, himself a native-born American citizen raised in Milwaukee by Pakistani parents, both of whom were devout Muslims and physicians, launches into these and related questions with deliberate determination. He does not provide answers.

There's plenty of potential for friction between Amir and Emily but Akhtar ratchets it up further by adding three other characters to the play. There's Abe, Amir's nephew (Mohit Gautam), who wants legal help for an Imam in the news. And there's a second affluent cross-racial married couple. Isaac (Benim Foster) is a curator at the Whitney Museum with the power to help Emily's career take off. He's Jewish and married to Jory, a black woman who is a high-powered attorney working in the same firm as Amir.

Director Gordon Edelstein choreographs the movements of these characters through inevitable clashes over the 90 minute show with crisp efficiency. There's no intermission to slow up the chain reaction of conflict. In this production, no character is allowed to elicit identification or sympathy via the application of personal charm by an actor. While the conflicts have particularity, there is a kind of formulaic rigor to the piece that prevents any naïve resolution. I wager that the current popularity of this play arises in part from our cultural need to have conversations about the questions at its core--but don't expect to leave the theater with answers in mind.

DISGRACED runs through November 8 in New Haven.

photo by T. Charles Erickson

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