First produced in
2012, Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced
has the distinction of being the
most produced play in the United States in the 2015-2016 theatre year. Set
on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Akhtar’s
play is the story of Amir, a high-flying lawyer at the top of his game who
wants to be a partner in his prestigious firm. When he agrees to support an
Imam accused on charges of funding terrorism, he finds his world and
assumptions challenged, and rapidly slipping away from him. Following a long
line of dinner-party plays where arguments and battle-lines are drawn,
territories staked, and relationships forged, broken, destroyed, Akhtar is
clear to demarcate his characters’ points of view, but it lacks the spark which
would make this play a fierce critique of our current socio-political
attitudes.
Staged in the
Wharf 1 theatre, Sarah
Goodes’ production for Sydney
Theatre Company is sleek and crisp, and moves with clarity and efficiency,
building up its arsenal before unleashing the full force of the play’s
arguments upon the characters and us, the audience. Handsomely supported by STC
Resident Designer Elizabeth Gadsby, we find ourselves in a modern and spacious
apartment on New York ’s Upper
East Side – a long row of windows opens out to a small balcony,
while its interior is comfortably well-off, and speaks of wealth and security
many of us can only dream of. But this is part of Akhtar’s – Disgraced’s – point – the comfortability
and security of complacency, ingrained prejudices which go unchecked until they
erupt and cause real damage. Cleverly, Gadsby’s set pulls our focus from the
couches and windows upstage, to the dining table downstage, almost in the
audience’s lap, putting them – and us – in a crucible, like water to boiling
oil, to see how they react. Damien
Cooper’s lighting is deftly used to convey passing time in the interludes
between scenes, while his interiors are crisply lit, flooded with bright white
light. Steve Francis’ sound design and composition echoes the passions and
thrust of Akhtar’s characters, and grounds the play with a tangible sense of
identity or heritage.
Goodes’ cast all
rise to the challenge Akhtar has laid in front of them with relish. As Amir, Sachin
Joab brings an air of cool sophistication to his lawyer, but his reluctance to
help the Imam as well as his nephew, and his views on religion and specifically
Islam upon which he has turned his back following a strict adherence during his
childhood, cast him in a very different light at the end of the play to how we
saw him at the beginning. As his wife Emily, Sophie
Ross is charming and strong-willed, but there is perhaps a underdeveloped vein
to her character which means she doesn’t quite fare so well in Akhtar’s
plotting. As Abe, Amir’s nephew, Shiv Palekar has a small but crucial role, and
he plays it with a mix of surety and naivety, grounding him in a very real
world where he isn’t quite sure how much to say or who to trust. Glenn
Hazeldine’s art curator Isaac is very much Amir’s counterpoint, but also
directly challenges Emily’s assumptions and ideas, and he plays the character
without much of his usual mannerisms and performance tics, giving one of his
strongest and most grounded performances in recent years. Paula
Arundell’s Jory, Isaac’s wife and colleague of Amir’s, is perhaps Emily’s
opposite, but is also a direct antagonist to Amir; her bluntness and audacity
to speak what is on her mind is refreshing, but it doesn’t absolve her from her
the remarks she makes at the dinner table. There are some who will argue that
the distinctly American accents and locations are not important, that it might
as well be set in contemporary Australia, but I do think the location, the
accents, the time-frame and specific reference to the tenth anniversary of the
September 11 attacks make this a distinctly American play which has
reverberations and resonances – perhaps even repercussions – throughout our
current socio-political landscape, and it is stronger for being so.
Akhtar’s play pays
homage to a long and established line of plays revolving around dinner parties
of one form or another. Plays like Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Yasmina Reza’s God
of Carnage, and almost anything by Tennessee
Williams are exemplars in this regard, and Disgraced fits right in. What these plays recognise and play upon
is the notion that once you gather a group of four (or more) people in one
place, you are necessitating each person having a different point of view, and
also the possibility of them supporting one of the other characters, regardless
of whether or not they are part of the same couple. Here, Akhtar uses this
format to problematise and unpack a raft of (potentially incendiary) ideas such
as the plurality or duality of identity or culture, and the potential
incompatibilities which may arise; is it possible to attain (and maintain) the
American Dream in post-9/11 America; latent or ingrained racial prejudices
which have become naturalised by time and complacency; cultural appropriation,
discrimination, and ignorance, with a side-helping of Orientalism. These are
not light-weight issues, and are ones we should be addressing on-stage and off.
But Akhtar’s play
doesn’t quite delve into them in the detail – or give them the full attention –
they deserve, and it makes for a strangely disaffecting play at times. Emily’s
frequent claims of Islam being founded on wisdom and beauty without
acknowledging the darker and more problematic aspects of the faith are only
briefly supported with references to the Great
Mosque of Córdoba, Islamic tiling traditions, and passing references to the
Quran. When Isaac levels the charge of orientalism against her when he sees her
portrait of Amir styled after Velázquez’s ‘Portrait of Juan de Pareja’, she retorts
with a classically-defiant ‘fuck you,’ but the charge isn’t raised again nor is
it problematised any further, which seems troubling when you consider her
entire artistic practice is based in cultural (mis)appropriation, or selective
cultural appropriation, taking the bits and images and ideas of Islam that
appeal to her and her aesthetic sensibility without acknowledging the rest of
the iceberg.
Akhtar also levels his gaze at
cultural plurality or duality, and asks if it is possible to attain (and/or
maintain) the American Dream in a post-9/11 world. Yet, as far as the play goes
in trying to enunciate the problems at the heart of contemporary twenty-first
century America, it doesn’t go far enough, nor does it really dig deep enough
either. Much of the argument made in Disgraced
to this end revolves around the Quran, and how literally it should be
interpreted. At one point Amir says that the reality of the Quran can be found
in the desert communities of the seventh century AD, and that if the Quran is
to make any real sense, that context is to be recreated. While interpretation
is debated – a case of ‘to beat’ stemming from the same root verb as ‘to leave’
when talking about what to do when your wife doesn’t listen – Jory makes the
point that sometimes intolerance is a way forwards (her example being France
The questions and points he
raises are ugly, and certainly not for audiences who like theatre to be
comfortable, and it is all the stronger for being so. But Akhtar has a habit of
sticking the knife into a subject without moving it around; he doesn’t use his
metaphorical knife to agitate, to put much actual pressure or difficulties in a
character’s way, but rather to sting or aggravate. Another example of this can
be seen at the end of the play. Scene 3 ends strongly with an ugly consequence
of the discussion, but Scene 4 picks up six months later, as Amir and Emily are
estranged but still speaking with a degree of familiarity, even if it is pained
and coloured with a sense of finality. Scene 4 feels redundant and superfluous,
a weaker ending than what we were left with at the end of Scene 3. Some of the
content of Scene 4 is interesting, and is worth including – perhaps in an
earlier scene, even if to do so might counter the taut thrust of Akhtar’s play
– but the ending feels wrong, or less strong than what was intended.
This is not a fault of Goodes’
production, but rather the play itself, as are much of my criticisms with this
play. Goodes’ production works through the arguments in the play with a robust
intellect and a sense of grappling with something much larger than we are able
to comprehend, but the play still leaves us wanting more. And maybe that’s the point in the end – that our current
attitudes and actions towards racial and cultural tolerance and inclusivity
(among so many other pertinent issues) leave a lot to be desired, so we have to
put our faith in something else. Something bigger than governments and laws and
physical borders. Something that makes (more) sense than what we can see…
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