Disgraced on Broadway!

Hi guys,

Some of you may remember the play that I presented to you last year in American Theatre class. I was just checking on it and saw that it is on Broadway now!!

"DISGRACED is the critically acclaimed play about 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." -http://www.disgracedonbroadway.com

For those of you who do not know the play, it is called Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar who is "a new American voice who finds urgent dramatic connections that serious theatregoers crave” (The Washington Post). It won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It emphasizes on mostly identity as well as religion and assimilation. Feeling the obligation to change one’s identity creates alienation of self and fake-reality-balloon, which eventually bursts out. Tha play shows us the story of Amir Kapoor- who is a successful Pakistani-American lawyer who distances himself from his culture and hides his family's origin in order to adapt American society easily and live the American Dream. For quite a while, he lives that life on the Upper East Side with his beautiful American wife who loves Muslim culture more than her husband. However, after he attends his nephew's court, his secrets become apparent and with his secrets, his oppressed inner thoughts and believes also become obvious.

In this play, we see "looking like the part" and "acting like the part" ideas clearly. Amir is definitely acting like the part while saying he doesn't like Muslim belief or culture. We can definitely see post 9/11 ideas of an American person on Amir. Yet, still he is not really accepted since we see, later on in the play, how he is treated just because he attends to a court as a bystander.

I enjoyed this play a lot. It was short yet thorough. We can see multiculturalism, the life of a second generation of an immigrant family in America and Muslims as the foreign enemies instead of Asians. I've tried to find you the play online since I read it last year but I couldn't. However, I have the pdf, so if any of you is interested, tell me and I can send it to you.

For the Broadway production, the cast is awesome (at least I think so): Josh Radnor (How I Met Your Mother), Gretchen Mol (Boardwalk Empire), Karen Pittman(The Bourne Legacy), and Hari Dhillon (Holby City)... It is directed  by Kimberly Senior. 

-Ezgi ULUSOY