Seattle Repertory Theatre’s Disgraced features a wonderfully designed set. All the action takes place in the gorgeous Manhattan apartment of lawyer Amir Kapoor and his painter wife Emily, which is laid out to offer an open flow between the living room, kitchen, balcony, and dinning area with a posh style. It’s an apartment that seems like a dream while still feeling lived in.
Thus ends a summation of the positive aspects of Disgraced.
Disgraced features nary an ounce of genuine humanity and is snickeringly bad at times. It’s borderline flabbergasting that Seattle Rep would stage a production so far below the company’s typical high standard of quality. The show centers on Amir, whose path to becoming a partner at his law firm hits a snag when he attends the court hearing of an imam accused of raising funds for terrorism. Amir has denounced his Muslim heritage (even hiding it from his employer), but he goes to court at the behest of his wife who has an extreme love of Islamic culture and bases her art on it. When Amir’s coworker Jordy and her art dealing husband Isaac come over for dinner, drinks flow and a heated debate about the nature of Islam arises, which leads Amir down a path of full-blown character unraveling.
The problem isn’t that playwright Ayad Akhtar’s points about the challenges and contradictions of being a Muslim in America in Disgraced are invalid or too controversial to stomach (though at least one audience member angrily stormed out of the performance I attended), it’s that they’re presented in an unbelievably amateurish way. It’s baffling that a show with such shoddy writing won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama. The play is manipulative in a hollow, pretentious way. It seems like Akhtar sat down with a checklist of ways in which to try and get an audience to gasp and then went about marking off each box. Demeaning reduction of religions? Check. Infidelity? Check. Unrepeatable racist words being yelled? Check. Spousal abuse? Check. Racial savagery? Check. 9/11 sympathizing? Check. The moments that lead to each event don’t seem like natural escalations of the situation that any actual human being would make, but rather wild leaps across a chasm in order to push the buttons triggering audience reactions. The atmosphere remains tense throughout—only in that one guards against whichever manufactured appalling moment awaits around the bend.
While the characters are all written without many shreds of humanity, the poor performances by the four main actors only further pulls them from reality. There’s nothing the actors bring to the table that elevates their characters above simple descriptors. Bernard White’s Amir is repressed rage. Nisi Sturgis’s Emily is feeble naivety. J. Anthony Crane’s Isaac is pompous sciolism. Zakiya Young’s Jordy is just forgettable.
The only performance with any life comes from Behzad Dabu as Amir’s nephew Abe, a young man embedded in the local Muslim community who constantly deals with an overwhelming sense of injustice from religious and racial profiling. Dabu conveys the complicated mix of anger, optimism, and yearning to no be an “other” in a country that treats him like one. He’s the only character written with any nuance and deftness, but alas he only briefly shows up early and late to bookend the show.
Disgraced is “challenging” theater at its absolute worst. It’s a show that pretentious people brag about having seen in order to open up “deep” discussions at social gatherings. Instead of offering authentic human character it attempts to shock viewers into submission. And it fails. Oh boy, does it ever fail.
