McCarter Theatre's 'Disgraced': With whom do we identify?

Two things become abundantly clear during McCarter Theatre's production of Ayad Akhtar's living-room drama Disgraced. First, its conceit, four ethnically diverse Manhattan sophisticates airing their political differences over a contentious dinner, seems, in the current climate, downright quaint. Second, though this, his first play, won him the 2013 Pulitzer Prize and was the most produced play in the United States last season, in light of Akhtar's excellent subsequent work, some of its narrative patches are more clumsy than provocative.

That subsequent work includes The Invisible Hand, which opened this spring at Theatre Exile, and featured a powerful performance by Maboud Ebrahimzadeh as the brash, British leader of an Islamist terrorist cell. Apparently, he's a good fit for Akhtar, because at McCarter, he plays Amir, the brash Pakistan-born, New York-bred mergers and acquisitions lawyer at the center of its swirling identity conflicts and crises.

Amir's wife, Emily (Caroline Kaplan), is white, blonde, and earnest, a painter determined to highlight Islamic art's influence on the West. Amir, now an "apostate," doesn't buy it. He's caught between his wife's well-meaning but superficial understanding of Islam; the passion of his young cousin Abe (Adit Dileep) for a possibly railroaded, possibly terrorism-supporting imam; and his own deep-seated "tribalism." Add Isaac (Kevin Isola), a Jewish Whitney Museum curator interested in Emily's work, and his African American wife, Jory (Austene Van), Amir's no-nonsense colleague at a Jewish-owned law firm, and it should be no surprise this highly combustible mixture explodes.

Kaplan and director Marcela Lorca get close to making Emily flesh and blood; she usually plays more like a narrative catalyst. Here, she seems to be a woman slowly waking from a lifelong pleasant dream. But this play's turning point is never truly convincing - though Amir's issues are - and I have yet to see a production in which its fight choreography succeeds.

Still, Ebrahimzadeh, charm ablaze, repeats the smartest trick in Akhtar's playbook, the same one at the heart of The Invisible Hand: With whom do we identify? Amir is so likeable, so reasonable. He's us, and yet he's not. And if he's not us, who are we?

The difference between seeing Disgraced just a season or two ago and now is that one imagines every character onstage, instead of battling each other, would be downing whiskey in unity over our present election cycle's own disgraces. It might not be the tableau Akhtar intended, but it adds a layer of complexity, and perhaps stability, to the always shifting ground of our national identity.