Theatre in Review: Disgraced (Lyceum Theatre)Amir Kapoor has it made. A litigator specializing in mergers and acquisitions, he works for a leading financial firm. He lives in a cavernous East Side penthouse with his beautiful and talented wife, Emily, a painter. You can say he is the living embodiment of the American Dream. True, he has changed his name to make it sound less Muslim -- but why not? He is a self-described apostate from Islam. He loves fine Scotch. He dines on pork tenderloin. If the members of his immediate family are bemused by his way of life, so be it. It's God's little joke that Emily, who is Caucasian, is more attracted to Islam than he; she has even entered into a new phase of her work, creating intricately patterned compositions that pay tribute to the stunning tile work found in mosques around the world. But, overall, Amir has built himself a luxurious fortress against his heritage. Except that fortress is built on sand and is about to slide into the morass of suspicion and antipathy that is the fate of anyone of Muslim background in America today, for, in defending himself against the hatred of the world, Amir has forgotten to guard against hatred of the self. As Disgraced begins, Amir's nephew, Abe (changed from Hussein), is asking him to intervene in the case of an imam who is being held by the government for funneling money to Hamas. Abe insists that the imam is a holy man, the victim of racial profiling. Amir points out that he has already recommended a fine legal team. Abe, hesitating just a bit, tries to explain why Amir's participation is necessary. "The imam wants a Muslim lawyer," says Abe, pointedly and with some disgust. Amir gives in and attends a hearing; as a result, his name ends up, after the jump, in a Times story that suggests he is one of the imam's supporters. This turn of events puts him on edge -- Emily, who has never experienced any kind of profiling, can't imagine what is upsetting him -- and his fears are borne out when his boss and mentor is suddenly impossible to get on the phone and his supervisor begins scrutinizing his job application for untruths. (The lies -- tiny, hair-splitting things -- are there to be found; he has listed his parents as being of Indian birth, even though they were born in Pakistan at the time of its independence from India.) This already-tense situation explodes at a dinner party that is a minefield of racial resentments and hidden aggressions. The guests are Isaac, the gallery owner who is featuring Emily's work, and his wife, Jory, who is black and who works with Amir. Isaac's praise of Emily's Islamic painting gets on Amir's nerves, as does Emily's defense of the religion as a bulwark of civilization during the Dark Ages. Invoking Aristotle, she says, "Without our translation of their translation, we wouldn't even have him." Amir pushes back, insisting that hatred is central to the religion to the extent that it even infects someone as secular as he. So deep-rooted it is, he insists, that on 9/11, along with being horrified, he felt just a little bit proud. This is far too much for Isaac, whose counterarguments are fierce and personal -- but there is worse to come, as a series of bombshell secrets are detonated, leading to a horrifying act that induced gasps in the audience at the performance I attended. This is followed by a kind of emotional autopsy, held several months later, involving confrontations between Amir and both Emily and Abe; during this scene, a kind of fierce silence reigned in the auditorium, the kind when you know the audience listening intently, hanging on to each line for dear life. Ayad Akhtar's play, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, is remarkable for so many reasons, it's hard to know where to begin. At 90 minutes, there isn't an ounce of fat on it; it follows a single clear dramatic line leading Amir to disaster. Amir himself is a remarkable creation, a character that we haven't really seen before. A man of great accomplishment and charm, his fatal flaw is that he believes that his brutal candor about Islam will inoculate him from the prejudice of the larger culture. (This is established early on in a speech about his childhood crush on a Jewish girl, to which his mother responded with an astonishingly ugly act.) But the very act of trying to erase his past arouses suspicion and he finds himself ever more entangled in the web of prejudice that he has spent his life trying to escape. His struggle is set against a portrait, in miniature, of a society poisoned by grievance and identity politics. And Akhtar is a master of dialogue that crackles; line after line in Disgraced lands like a well-placed dagger. Akhtar is fortunate to have the services of the director Kimberly Senior, who is clearly on his wavelength. From the opening image, in which we see Amir, dressed only from the waist up and looking oddly vulnerable as he poses for Emily, the drama builds steadily to the fury of that climactic dinner party. Hari Dhillon, who played Amir in the West End, is an ideal choice: He is clearly a man of confidence and accomplishment, but when he deflects a question about India or insists that certain comments made in the office mean nothing, you see flickers of deeply buried resentment. When uncorked, his rage is something to behold, and he also is deeply moving in the final scene, when he tries to put his life back together. As Emily, Gretchen Mol is the voice of sweet reason, until her betrayal is unmasked and we see the terrible sadness within; she is also capable of investing the dialogue with a bone-deep chill when the occasion calls for it. Josh Radnor captures all of Isaac's humor and self-righteousness, making him a perfect antagonist for Amir, especially when his selfish reasons for engaging him in battle are laid bare. Karen Pittman's Jory is crisply amusing, every bit the ever-tolerant wife until blindsided by a revelation she never expected to have. Danny Ashok provides a sharply etched study as Abe, who practically slips into radicalism before our eyes. Disgraced needs a certain level of production values, which it certainly gets here. John Lee Beatty's penthouse set, with its coffered ceilings, wrought iron bannisters, and terrace view, is a stunner -- and, tellingly, Amir and Emily seem a little bit lost in it. The color palette is restrained in the extreme, except for Emily's blue Islamic painting, which sits on the wall like a scab waiting to be picked. Ken Posner once again shows why he is one of the two or three best lighting designers working on Broadway today, creating a series of time-of-day looks that adds depth and detail to the stage picture; he also provides some beautiful effects for the transitions between scenes. Jennifer von Mayrhauser's costumes are perfectly imagined for each character. Jill BC Du Boff's sound design blends a handful of effects with music that sounds like an Islamic call to prayer. There is much more to Disgraced, so much that it is remarkable that Akhtar is able to pack it into such a brief running time. This is a bold, biting work, one that speaks powerfully to the troubled moment in which we dwell. In the end, what happens to Amir implicates us all.--David Barbour 
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