The Alliance Theatre production of Ayad Ahktar’s “Disgraced,” directed by Susan Booth, is simultaneously quite entertaining and disturbing. It has a postmodern sensibility that delivers a powerful experience without spoon-feeding the audience heaps of intended meaning. Depending on one’s personal experiences and beliefs, watching this play opens up multivalent potential reactions. The acting in this play is really remarkable, and the effect on the audience was one conversation provoking. Scores of people stood in the theatre and in the lobby afterwards discussing the experience they’d just had.
At the basic level, the play explores issues of identity. Ahktar’s writing draws out multiple vantage points for how identity is constructed, experienced, and mediated by culture. The story follows lawyer Amir Kapoor, portrayed by Andrew Ramcharan Guilarte, through the gradual deconstruction of his own world. The scaffolding he created to shield himself from the often stigmatized perception of Muslim-Americans begins to crumble through a series of choices and actions that he takes. As dramaturg Celise Kalke points out, “[Amir] realizes that the American promise of self-definition and reinvention, seemingly limitless, has for him very real boundaries.” The catalyst of his downturn is being mislabeled as connected to, as Muslim legal council, an imam accused of funding terrorists. Ahktar brings to live all of the conflict and contradiction that make Amir such a real character in contemporary American drama.
In terms of staging, of the action takes place inside a modern New York City apartment—the height of the action occurs around a dinner table. The staging and blocking here keep the action tight and focused, as the stakes grow higher to a fever pitch. The physicality of the performance is highlighted by the natural escalation of dialogue aided by the contention in the room and the level of inebriation the characters achieve. Once they’re all loosened up, the gloves come off, Amir at the center.
Tinashe Kajese-Bolden plays Amir’s law colleague Jory whose personal mantra is a Henry Kissinger quotation: “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.” Hearing this gives us a sense of apprehension in terms of her character. Bolden’s performance serves the character she portrays, intentionally creating a feeling of ambivalence, an effect which all of the actors achieve in their work.
Andrew Benator plays Isaac, Jory’s husband and the art dealer that Emily becomes entangled with; Benator delivers a challenging and, at times, hilarious performance—contradicting and analytical. Isaac and Amir clash in interesting and disturbing ways that outline the inherently ambivalent nature of how people express their differences to one another. The idea of who is right or wrong dissolves as the conversation becomes more disturbingly real and problematic.
Courtney Patterson delivers a strong performance of Emily, the artist and Amir’s wife. She’s fascinated with spiritual profundity of the Islamic tradition. Her art attempts to interpret some of the Islamic forms for a new audience. She clashes with her husband because their characters embody the lived experience of binary between pragmatism and idealism. The disruption of their lives forces each of them to reconsider their positions on their relationship with Islam and with one another.
Ali Sohaili embodies the role of Abe, Amir’s nephew who, like his uncle, struggles with what it is to be Muslim, American, and Muslim-American. His profound admiration and, ultimately, profound disgust in his uncle’s behavior lead him through a series of trials that land him in an extremely precarious space being branded as a potential extremist. Abe seems to be motivated by an intrinsic sense of righteousness and how that expresses changes with the evolving landscape of the play.
“Disgraced” is a success. The Alliance has achieved a safe space to explore the contentious nature of Muslim representation and the issues around Muslim identity in contemporary America. Given the circumstances we are experiencing today, the play enters onto the Atlanta theatre scene with a sense of kairos that makes it a must-see event.
David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” is the kind of play that will challenge you. At a basic level, it’s the story of three men who are wrapped up in a scheme to steal some valuable coins from a mark.
Having a little understanding of the issues that the play explores will contextualize the performance in a meaningful way. Drama scholar Matthew Roudané relates that this play comes from a 27 year-old Mamet, disillusioned with the crooked, adversarial American corporate landscape; he gives us a play that is nuanced, with characters who simultaneously embody those corporate tensions while also showing us the lived experience of the individuals who find themselves displaced and jeopardized by the gentrification brought upon by and machinations of corporate greed.
While this dramaturgical note gives us a clue toward the play’s intentions, the play that runs on the True Colors stage is not so easily characterized. Director John Dillon cast the play with all African American actors. Some of the ideological notions that Mamet was driving at did not come across so easily. As 21st century theatre-goers, moments when all of the characters duck down at the sound of police vehicles patrolling the streets evoked our current moment of violence and injustice, and the shockwaves of fear that startling images on the evening news generate. Even though this play is a period piece, there’s still an urgency that’s persuasive to a contemporary audience.
Something about the pacing that we usually get from a Mamet work was a bit off in the performance. At moments, partially due to distractions from cell phones lighting up and ringing, and at others seemingly due to disjointed chemistry onstage, I was taken out of the experience. Not to be too heavy-handed, it was a festive evening, it being opening night, Kenny Leon’s birthday, and an occasion to acknowledge and celebrate many key figures in the Atlanta theatre community and within the True Colors family.
The Southwest Arts Center is a beautiful theatre and one of our city’s best public arts assets. The southwest Atlanta theatre community is a diverse group of people. The space and setting of the play, as a junk shop, is visually intense, most every bit of the stage littered in artifacts. The play opens on Don and Bobby cleaning up after last night’s card game.
The cast, Neal Ghant (Teach), Garrett Gray (Bobby), and G. Valmont Thomas (Don) all delivered compelling performances.
Ghant plays Teach with an intensity and a desperation that does evoke some of Mamet’s critique of corporate behavior. As he works Don to agree with his plan, we see the grasping attitude come forth in flashes of cocksureness and aggression. Teach embodies a patriarchal lens for seeing the world. These characters come from an old, misogynistic world, and are moving into a new world, where that is not the paradigm. In reference to the invisible female characters, the vulgar terms that Teach applies to them feel a bit unearned, and Ghant doesn’t seem wholly comfortable spouting off that language.
As Bobby, Gray portrays a young man, eager to please his boss, Don. He has a plan in his mind, but he won’t reveal his motives. He comes across as simultaneously good-natured and naïve, yet an untrustworthy potential liability. Gray plays this ambivalence well.
Thomas plays Don, whose ambivalence is confounding. On the one hand, he plays a patriarchal figure to those around him, yet on the other hand, he also portrays a lack of awareness and tack that is startling. Here is a man who is planning a heist who has no experience or skill in planning heists; he’s a junk shop owner without the street smarts that Teach brings to the table. That’s why he needs a guy like Teach.d
Save for a few hiccups, the play raises interesting concerns about our current moment in terms of race, economy, and culture, where the voices of the marginalized need to be heard. The loudest voices in our culture are the ones with the most wealth and power. The ideas of gentrification and obsolescence alluded to in the True Colors introduction to the play, when applied to the recasting of the characters as all African American, enlivens a dialectic about the concerns of corporate power and systemic injustice, which is ever-prominent among the public discourses of our current political moment.
“American Buffalo” runs through March 6th at Southwest Arts Center, 915 New Hope Rd SW, Atlanta, GA 30331. For tickets or information, call 404.532.1901 or visit truecolorstheatre.org.
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