Friday the 13th: At the end of the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, the cast comes out for the curtain call, takes in the applause, waits for it to die down, looks out at the audience for a good while, and then leaves. For a few moments everything is quiet. There’s something fitting about silence. It gives you room to breathe and think. It doesn’t ask for agreement or conclusion—it’s its own thing.
The production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama just happened to open on the day of the Paris attacks, and what seemed to be a timely play got more than a little timelier. When France’s problems with Islam and the banning of the veil came up during a tense dinner party argument on stage, you could feel the actors’ lines land on the audience, jagged and challenging. There was no reaction.
In many ways, that curtain call was a much sharper and cunning ending than Akhtar’s, which blunts a far sharper and more radical play: a drama screaming to get out in front of an audience and shock it into submission all the way to the end. That this doesn’t happen is a shame and represents a special kind of failure—the success that evades greatness.
Amir and Emily are the type of couple people gush about: “He’s a lawyer, she’s an artist, they’re fantastic!” They might even add, “He’s Muslim, she’s white, that’s fantastic!” Their apartment is certainly fantastic and the play opens with a tableau worthy of Noel Coward: Emily is painting a picture of Amir in the manner of Valázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja. Yet there’s no sparkle or joy; just a smarmy mix of grievance and privilege.
Amir might be posing, but Emily’s the poseur. Overly proud of her suave Muslim husband, eager to use his connections to meet a powerful Whitney curator, and chiding him for not defending an Imam accused of funneling money to Hamas, Emily is a recognizable mix of progressive politics and upper class hauteur. Nisi Sturgis is expert at catching the smug, vaulting ambition behind Emily’s sincerity. And Bernard White shows how attractive that might be to a man like Amir, who is just a bit cruder than we’d like him to be.