Disgraced

Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar, premiered in Chicago in 2012. Later that year, the play opened Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center. Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013, opened on the West End in 2014, and made its Broadway premiere in 2015. Like the main character, Amir Akhtar is the son of Pakistani-American immigrants and was born in the United States. His work addresses the experience of being Muslim in America and the way Islamophobia has become integrated into American culture since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Disgraced received critical acclaim as well as the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013 and a nomination for the Best Play Tony Award in 2015.

The play confronts western views of Islam, both romanticized exotification and prejudice. Disgraced asks how three major world religions—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—instill and ingrain values that can create cultural bias, and the way the lens of our religious upbringing affects the way we view the world. The “disgrace” of the title refers to both the shame within the Muslim religion inflicted on those who separate from the faith and the shame that occurs in western society that demands that followers of Islam defer to and make up for the unsavory aspects of the western stereotypes associated with the religion. Disgraced questions the notion of radicalization in religion and the way anger results from subjugation and colonization.

Plot Summary

Disgraced takes place over four scenes with no intermission in the New York Upper West Side apartment of Amir and Emily. Amir is a successful corporate lawyer in mergers and acquisitions who is on track to become a partner alongside the Jewish men who run his firm. Born in the United States to Pakistani immigrants, Amir has changed his last name to Kapoor in order to hide the Muslim upbringing that he rejects and to pretend that he is Indian. His wife, Emily, is a White artist who, to Amir’s dismay, uses Islamic influences in her work. Emily and Abe, Amir’s nephew, try to persuade Amir to join the team representing a Muslim imam who has been jailed under the Patriot Act under suspicion of fundraising for a militant Palestinian organization. Amir agrees to attend the hearing and a write-up in the New York Times quotes him and makes it appear as if Amir is one of the imam’s attorneys.

Amir introduces his wife to Isaac, a curator at a prominent gallery who is married to Jory, an attorney at Amir’s firm. Emily, waiting anxiously to find out if Isaac will choose to display her work in an upcoming show, invites Isaac and Jory over for dinner. At work, Amir is facing suspicions as to his real ethnic and religious origins. The dinner party falls apart as Amir drinks heavily, and the couples argue about the nature of Islam and demonstrate their prejudices. Jory reveals that she has been named partner instead of Amir, and Isaac and Emily uncover the fact that they had an affair. An enraged Amir beats Emily, and Abe walks in and discovers what his uncle has done. In the last scene, Emily is divorcing Amir, but she has brought Abe, who has become a devout and possibly radicalized Muslim, to tell his uncle that the FBI has questioned and threatened to deport him. Amir begs Emily to forgive him, but she leaves.