San Jose Stage Co Presents Pulitzer Prize-winning DISGRACED

San Jose Stage Company presents Pulitzer Prize winning Drama Disgraced as part of its culturally diverse 34th season.

Can anyone ever truly escape their past? Amir Kapoor is living the American Dream and quickly climbing the corporate ladder at his powerful Manhattan law firm. But when Amir and his wife Emily, an artist inspired by Islamic painting, host a dinner party for friends and colleagues, the pleasant evening quickly erupts into a volatile cultural debate over race, religion, and class in the modern world. This combustible drama is the "emotionally shattering" (Newsday) tale of the stories we tell our friends, the secrets we tell our lovers, and the lies we tell ourselves to find our place in the American Dream.

Fearlessly examining the state of Islamic faith combined with the American Ideal, Ayad Akhtar probes at faith mixed with cultural assimilation in the modern world. Disgraced has become the most produced play in Contemporary Theatre. This Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony-nominated play provokes audiences with powerful societal commentary.

Ayad Akhtar is an OBIE & Pulitzer Prize winning playwright best known for his plays depicting the American-Muslim experience. Listed as the most produced playwright for the 2015/16 season by American Theatre Magazine; his work explores the human condition through the eyes of multicultural characters. His plays The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand received Off-Broadway runs and are currently being produced around the world. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, The Sundance Institute, Ucross, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Akhtar is currently the Resident Playwright with Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater.

William Ontiveros balances artistry and social relevancy to create powerful theater. As a co-founder of Pioneer Square Theatre in Seattle and associate artistic director at the Seattle Group Theatre in the early 90s, Bill introduced commercially successful, long-running productions (Angry Housewives,ER Emergency Room). Bill Championed emerging playwrights and staged works with diversity of cast and viewpoint, including the first local staging of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart/

Not seen on Northwest stages for 20 years, Bill returned in late 2014 with a complex, nuanced performance as Imam Saleem in Ayad Akhtar's The Invisible Hand at ACT - a role he reprised at Portland's Artists Repertory Theatre five months later. He appeared recently at Seattle Repertory Theatre in a May 2016 staged reading of Oubliettes, a new play by Seattle playwright Yussef El Guindi.

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