‘Disgraced’ At the Maltz – Lives Come Apart at the Seams

How does a Pulitzer Prize prizing winning play written several years ago simply become more and more relevant since it was first produced?  Is it a case of life imitating art?  Here is a play about an upcoming corporate lawyer, Amir, attempting to become fully assimilated into the cultural circle of professionals, to distance himself from his Muslim heritage through marriage and lifestyle, only to watch that façade implode.

The unseen element in the play is the current political environment, the result of a campaign full of invectives directed at, among others, Muslims, and the resulting highly contested “Muslim travel ban” and reports of illegal Immigration and Customs Enforcement roundups and deportations.  Playwright Ayad Akhtar might not have fully foreseen these extreme events when he wrote Disgraced, but after 9/11 he knew the xenophobic direction it was taking us and its impact on a man of Islamic heritage.

Amir (Fajer Kaisi) and his wife Emily (Vanessa Morosco) are pursuing the classic American Dream, living in a sophisticated Upper East Side apartment, obviously possessing the resources to enjoy their professional lives.  The set by Anne Mundell and the lighting by Paul Black telegraph Manhattan power couple.  It is a crisp, contemporary setting with a view of the Manhattan skyline from their balcony.

As a mergers and acquisition lawyer, Amir has acquired all the trappings of master of his craft.  Fajer Kaisi revels in his alpha male role, one which takes him from brash overconfidence to a stunning reversal of fortune.  He powerfully delivers this plunge with steely skill.  We first see him stridently berating his paralegal for missing three words in a contract, screaming into the phone “that’s why we pay you six figures!”

Fajer Kaisi and Eddie Morales

Emily, an artist, accepts this behavior as perfectly normal in her volatile husband who in turn is amused by and tolerates her latest passionate love for Islamic Art, something acquired during their travels in Moorish inspired Spain.  While he mildly encourages her latest works, it is also clear that he is not happy about this obsession.  Vanessa Morosco as Emily is a highly accomplished actress who portrays a striving artist waiting for her first big show, a wife devotedly in love who never fully grasps her husband’s deepest insecurities and secrets.

Amir’s nephew, Abe, sensitively played by Eddie Morales with wide-eyed adoration of his uncle is disturbed that a local Imam has been falsely imprisoned.  He feels this is politically motivated, and the manifestation of growing Muslimophobia.  He comes to his Aunt and Uncle for their help.  Emily urges her husband to lend his professional legal advice.  He loves his wife and reluctantly agrees.  Eventually there is a trial. However Amir’s name is mentioned in a newspaper article about the case although he wasn’t acting on behalf of the defendant, but suddenly his firm is aware of his Islamic background, something he has conspicuously hidden.

Vanessa Morosco, Fajer Kaisi, Chantal Jean-Pierre, Joel Reuben Ganz

The stage is set for a developing train wreck of a “dinner with friends,” one Emily gives for Isaac (Joel Reuben Ganz ) an art gallery owner who wants to exhibit her work and has more than a professional interest in, and his wife, Jory (Chantal Jean-Pierre), who coincidentally works with Amir in the same law firm.  The evening devolves into an increasingly revelatory and combative conversation between a Muslim (albeit assimilated), a Jew, the African-American attorney and a WASP, where Amir has to confront himself and his apostate views. 

Both Joel Reuben Ganz and Chantal Jean-Pierre as the interracial couple give outstanding, persuasive performances, Ganz a credible foil to Kaisi’s Amir and Jean-Pierre's Jory providing some well timed comic lines.  She comports herself with the precision of another professional on the move to corporate greatness.  The pot is stirred with a boiling brew of high voltage issues, religion, the clash of cultures and civilizations; Christian, Judaic, and Islamic, as well as the volatility and infidelity of both marriages.

With the help of the ubiquitous truth-teller, alcohol, Amir, who is already feeling deeply abased by his law firm is steadily driven into the recesses of his ancestry to the point of uttering the unutterable, that the crucible of 9/11 gave him some secret satisfaction; it is a pin-dropping game changer in the play.  Although he defends the revelation as being “tribal” and “in his bones,” he has become radioactive, meant to be shunned by the ultimate fall from grace.  The contrast is striking.  He is a broken man -- and the audience is left to deliberate whether there is any hope for the millennium old conflict of religious indoctrination and bias.

It is stunning, powerful theatre.  As J. Barry Lewis, the seasoned director of some 200 shows including many others at The Maltz as well as Dramaworks said “Disgraced focuses on the various ways each of us secretly continue to hold on to our tribal identities – our identities from birth, of our education – in spite of our various and ongoing attempts to enlighten our lives. We are products of the world we create, often finding safety in those tribal identities. The play has been called 'an evening of cocktails and confessions,’ and it is certain to spark dialogue about our own contradictions.”  Lewis skillfully brings those observations front and center utilizing a talented group of actors and technical professionals.

In addition to Paul Black’s lighting, Lewis had Marty Mets’ skillful sound design, the opening scene overlaying Middle Eastern music with the sounds of the city below, segueing to the music alone during scene changes and then, again, the unmistakable sounds of the city when Amir angrily opens the door to their balcony, a reminder of the world from which he is suddenly ostracized.  Leslye Menshouse’s costume design is chic, in keeping with the sophisticated early 21^st century Manhattan professional environment, replete with Amir’s expensive dress shirts.

The Maltz Theatre typically presents musicals, the majority of which are thoroughly outstanding.  They have also presented some remarkable serious theatre, Red and Other Desert Cities to name just a couple.  Seeing Disgraced there makes you yearn for more of these blockbusting dramas.

[Photographs of the actors by Alicia Donelan]

Trump’s Truman Show

Once upon a time one’s life meant having some time to oneself. Presidents were there but mostly in the background except during critical times. Now we are all exhausted from less than a month into the Trump presidency. Why? He is omnipresent; no matter where you look, to whom you speak, online, newspapers, or TV, big brother is there, “100%” as HE is fond of saying. Now we are subjected to the anxiety and ennui of Trump reporting 24-7.

I can’t help but think of the movie The Truman Show. Our existential hero of the film, Jim Carrey, is an orphan who has been raised by a corporation to live and be watched, without his knowledge, on a reality TV show 24-7 -- until he discovers this and tries to escape.  In this latter respect we’re in Carrey’s position, but this is an environment HE doesn’t want US to escape from.  As the Narcissist -in-Chief HE enjoys being watched in his own simulated reality TV show, a terrarium of which the contours are “alternative truths.”  Our role is to be spellbound.  Before I merely thought this behavior “crazy making” but it may be more --  preparation for almost anything, totalitarian rule by the Plutocracy, religious wars, the demolition of the Republic, a nuclear winter, or all rolled up into the Trumpocalypse (“the catastrophic destruction or damage of civilization following the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States of America.” -- from Urban Dictionary)

Instinctively, even if we survive we all know this will not end well.  I hope I am very wrong, and that the next four years will be bigly amazing, devoid of losers, with tremendous, terrific winners, but I fear it’s not gonna happen, zero percent.

Wistful Remembrances

Scrolling down my, now, all-too-ridiculously-lengthy  key word index to “Westport”  there is a score of entries, a testimony to the strong feelings I have towards where I worked and lived for some thirty years of my life, receding with the speed of light into the forgotten past.  The essence of this blog is a written record of remembering.  I speak not of major events, but the nuances of fleeting feelings.  I was reminded of this today by an entry from more than six years ago.  Although it is a review of Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, bravely produced by the Westport Country Playhouse, it evoked surreal feelings of place and time.  I quote the first and last paragraphs of that piece.  It could almost be read as a stand-alone (without the details of the theatre production) as it says as much about time, and wistful remembrances.

  

What a cynical title for Samuel Beckett’s brilliant play, courageously presented by the Westport Country Playhouse to celebrate its 80th anniversary. It is not the kind of light fare one might expect on a languid summer’s night at a country theatre far off Broadway, and it was a brave choice by the Theatre’s Artistic Director, Mark Lamos. But this is Westport, Ct - a bedroom community of NYC where we lived for so many years. In fact, we were there during the celebration of the Playhouse’s 40th anniversary – half of its lifetime ago -- so although we are now only summertime visitors, its byways are subliminally imprinted on us.

It was a night of powerful theatre. We exited to the parking lot. It had just rained and the humidity hung in the air, also rising off the steaming macadam and fogging our glasses. So we drove the back roads of Westport, returning to our boat, passing landmarks indelibly imprinted and always remembered such as the location of the old Westport National Bank (gone) turning left onto the only road that runs west and parallel to Riverside Avenue, along the southern side of the Saugatuck River, passing homes where we had partied in our youth (including one Christmas eve where guests in an alcoholic induced stupor set a couch on fire and it had to be dragged out to the snow to extinguish the flames), the building our first Internist once occupied (who later died in the same nursing home as Ann’s mother), the Westport Women’s Club where my publishing company held our annual Xmas party for so many years, my old office itself across the river where I worked for the first ten years in Westport, now the Westport Arts Center, past the street where Ann and I went for Lamaze classes when she was pregnant, over the old bridge crossing the Saugatuck, turning left then right under the Turnpike past the structure which used to be The Arrow Restaurant (long gone) where Ann reminded me they made her favorite dinner, crispy fried chicken, and then further west to Norwalk, all fragments of our own earth mound, being earth bound, trying to understand. Theatre to think about. Oh, happy days.

View of Westport, CT from my office circa 1972