“[Humans] don’t become slaves out of mere calculating self-interest. Slavishness is in the soul, as Gorky complained.” — Ernest Becker, Denial of DeathDisgraced, now showing at the Alliance Theatre, specializes in the unsayable. The drama, penned by Ayad Akhtar and featured on Broadway, has come to Atlanta, finding its time one month before what promises to be a polarizing and xenophobic presidential primary.
The action centers around two elite New York couples — Amir and Emily, Jory and Isaac. Amir Kapoor (Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte) has risen to prominence in a mostly-white law firm, making his name in mergers and acquisitions. However, it is his name that gives him the most trouble. Amir hopes for partnership, but some of the stakeholders are unreasonably suspicious of him despite his best efforts at assimilation, symbolized by his metamorphosis from Abdullah to Amir when he emigrated from Pakistan to the United States.
Amir’s wife, Emily (Courtney Patterson), is an up-and-coming artist who draws from the Islamic tradition and is painting a portrait of her husband inspired by Velazquez. At the start of the play and in between scenes, huge images of her sketches and final work are projected onto the interior walls of Amir and Emily’s luxe Upper East Side apartment — itself a gorgeous set design — establishing the painting as a centrally recurring symbol.
Velazquez, an artist of the royal Spanish court, painted his assistant, the young Juan de Pareja, around 1650. The painting is now considered a masterpiece. Early on in the play, the identity of the subject is up for debate — slave or servant? moor or national? — and the audience is allowed to wonder if there are any meaningful differences between these categories. By referring to Juan de Pareja as a moor, Akhtar ties in Othello and The Tempest and old questions of darkness, otherness and enslavement.
The audience is prompted to ask the same questions of Amir, transposing themes from the European royal court to the elite playgrounds of twenty-first century New York City. Akhtar constantly reminds us of this landscape — mentions of vacations in the Hamptons are casual, the couples drink the priciest scotch, Amir brags about his $700 Charvet shirts. Even in moments of controversy, Akhtar threads in pauses to highlight this insular world, like when Amir and Isaac (Andrew Benator) realize they go to the same gym in the middle of an argument.
Isaac, a Jewish art dealer, takes an interest in Emily’s work, prompted by a favorable reviewer and a gentle push from his wife, Jory (the brilliant Tinashe Kajese), one of Amir’s co-workers. He decides to include Emily in his next show at the Whitney. The plot picks up momentum when the couples meet for dinner so Isaac can deliver the news in person.
At dinner, Akhtar introduces a second motif when we learn Emily is reading Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, a work of psychological theory perhaps best known for its short cameo in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. In it, Becker expounds on Soren Kierkegaard’s theory of the philistine — the person who lives in a “certain dull security” satisfied by society’s triviality. Becker speaks of the choice between community and isolation — one offering a form of enslavement to “others,” the other offering personal dignity and freedom, but certain isolation.
While Becker provides this psychological backdrop, Akhtar sets a distinct political context. He manages to have Jory bring up her unusual role model, Henry Kissinger — former national security advisor and secretary of state under the Nixon administration. Jory tells the party about a Kissinger quote she keeps above her bed: not the infamous Vietnam War bombing order, “Anything flies on anything that moves,” but the recent, “If I had to choose between justice and disorder, on the one hand, and injustice and order, on the other, I would always choose the latter.”
No stranger to accusations of war crimes, most of Kissinger’s human rights record is, at the least, troubling. But most relevant to Disgraced may be the way in which the Khmer Rouge used the U.S. atrocities Kissinger oversaw to recruit and then unleash new horrors on their own people. In light of current U.S. anxieties about ISIS, it is fitting that Kissinger gets an extended reference. It is doubly relevant considering Hillary Clinton’s recent identification with the statesman in a presidential debate.
The dinner builds tension toward its climactic moments of controversy. When the debate moves from Emily’s un-ironic use of Islamic tradition in her art, which she endlessly defends, to Islam itself, things get heated. Amir, a self-proclaimed apostate, is the most vocal critic of his abandoned religion, the others preferring a more inclusive, tolerant tack. The argument comes to a head when Isaac accuses Amir of self-loathing and then asks plainly how he felt during the September 11 attacks. In the response comes the unsayable — Amir felt proud.
“For once,” he says, “we were winning.” The audience sat in nervous silence, with a touch of the shock that comes with taboo. The dinner falls apart here, all parties too upset to carry on. Amir declares he is going out for champagne, in hopes of saving the night. Jory offers to accompany him but with plans to tell him that she has been offered partner before him. In their absence, we discover that Isaac’s interest in Emily is not so distant after all. They had a one-night stand at the London Frieze Art Fair, and he pressures her to keep it going.
When Amir and Jory return, Jory comes in the door first, only to catch Isaac and Emily in a kiss. She wastes no time, asking Emily, “Are you having an affair with my husband?” Once Amir catches up, he takes a moment to gather his pain and rage, then turns the blame on Jory. He accuses her of ruining his marriage and career, lists the reasons he should have been promoted — especially his superior work ethic — and explodes, “You think you’re the n***er here? I’m the n***er! Me!”
Here the audience is entirely still. Isaac and Jory take their exit, and Amir turns to his wife, asking for the truth. She confesses, and moves to him, looking for forgiveness, but is met with the back of a hand, then a closed fist.
Jory comes to embody her favorite Kissinger quote, accepting an unfair promotion to preserve the order of the office. Amir, imploding ever faster as the play nears conclusion, arcs towards disorder. He and Emily separate. He drinks more and ignores his nephew’s pleas for legal help, even after he is unfairly profiled and picked up by the FBI. When the curtain falls, we are left to ponder if Amir found any justice at all, or if there is any such thing as justice to find.
It is clear why the play has won so many awards — a Pulitzer, an Obie, a Regional Tony. The dialogue is superb, the pacing is always on time, the humor sincere. It is an intellectual play, laden with references from the literary and artistic world. And yet, it is direct and simple in its most relevant moments, almost obviously so.
And this is where I have most of my questions. The play openly critiques U.S. imperialism, American racism and U.S. intolerance of Islam. In doing so, it goes where we are not allowed to tread: any alternative view of 9/11 and any hard look at the heart of structural American discrimination — specifically, the n-word with all of its legacy of enslavement. However, following the play, there is no language to actually talk about how the rest of the world views 9/11 or the implications of the n-word being applied to or deployed by an immigrant group.
What is represented on stage, then, is a sort of fantasy of free speech — which is a stark commentary on the state of our actual public dialogue. And while Becker and his questions of personal enslavement serves as a soft, indirect comment on capitalism, the play raises its critiques within the U.S. logics of “Us vs. Them” and love for winners. In short, it questions our intolerance but not our fear of weakness.
However, I do not think this is a failing of Akhtar, as much as it was a factor of how much discomfort he felt his audience could handle. For U.S. citizens, to look in the mirror means to see a suspicious face, the face of the neighbor who locks the door when a new neighbor comes to introduce themselves. Disgraced does important work in elevating the discourse around Islamophobia, but it is a shame that most of the discussion around it — including in its public accolades — has stayed in this one dimension. Akhtar has so much more to offer, if only a U.S. audience were ready for it.
