Jordan Friend, Chaela Phillips, Jenna Rossman, and Jesse Bhamrah (Lock & Company)
In NextStop Theater Company’s urgently staged production, Ayad Akhtar’s 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winner Disgraced acknowledges how complicated and nuanced one’s feelings about racial identity and religion can be—and how, when these issues bubble to the surface, other people are likely to disappoint you. Yet the real tragedy comes when a person ends up disappointing himself.
On the surface, the play’s core conflicts sound contrived: after all, much of the briskly moving 90-minute play is set at a dinner party for, as the company puts it, “a Muslim, an African American, a Jew, and a Christian.”
At this party are two couples: Amir (Jesse Bhamrah), a (disavowed) Islamic lawyer and Emily (Jenna Rossman), a white woman artist; and Jory (Chaela Phillips), a female black attorney on the rise and Isaac (Jordan Friend), a Jewish art curator As the night continues, tempers rise, with Amir and Emily’s stylish penthouse apartment (courtesy of NextStop’s designer Jack Golden) serving as a self-conscious backdrop.
A big break for Emily’s career has brought the couples together for a celebration, but other factors linger in the background. Amir and Jory are coworkers at a law firm, and Amir’s complicated relationship with his culture has allowed many of his colleagues to conveniently assume he is Indian—until he is reluctantly drawn into a public legal battle surrounding an Islamic leader. His minor involvement causes ripple effects across his career and relationships and brings his inner conflicts to the surface. Emily’s Islam-influenced work has caught the attention of Isaac, but perhaps more for its provocative backstory (and the artist behind it) than the work itself.
Akhtar processes these inner workings and complexities with sophisticated grace—the tense play leads to moments of pure anxiousness and discomfort for the audience. Most of the actors offer heightened, almost stylized performances (Phillips’ Jory is the most subtle and realistic), but that effect ratchets up the tension in NextStop’s intimate performance space. As the self-assured, yet clearly troubled Amir, Bhamrah has a particularly magnetic sort of confidence, one that gets chipped away at as his world slowly begins to unravel.
Back to that dinner party. It’s easy to get engrossed in the war of words and ideas Disgraced presents. So when all that debate is interrupted by a rather conventional plot twist, the move feels abrupt, an unwelcome distraction from the weightier issues at hand. The play works best when circumstances don’t come together quite so neatly — this is a work, after all, that knows that the world is a very messy place indeed.
Disgraced runs through Oct. 1 at NextStop Theatre in Herndon. $17.50-$55. Buy tickets here.
