Review: 'Disgraced' is brutal, complex, and great theater

Ayad Akhtar's smart, brutal drama Disgraced will be the most-produced play in the country this season. Philadelphia Theatre Company gets the first local crack at it, with a visually satisfying but stiff production. But then again, this is a play all about how nothing is quite what it seems.

Amir (Pej Vahdat), a handsome, successful mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, is a secular Muslim version of Don Draper. Running from what he considers a shameful past, he has taken a new name, new nationality, and a blond, white, painter wife, Emily (Monette Magrath), who, to his ongoing consternation, fetishizes Islamic influences on Western artistic tradition.

After a tough run of events, including giving reluctant support to the incarcerated imam of his young cousin Abe (Anthony Mustafa Adair), Amir and Emily host a dinner party. In attendance are Isaac (Ben Graney), a Jewish Whitney curator interested in Emily's work, and his African American wife, Jory (Philly actor Aimé Donna Kelly), an associate at Amir's law firm. And then things really take a turn.

Remember when politics and religion were unacceptable topics for dinner party conversation? Nah, me either. In life, as onstage, it makes for great theater. Isaac is still quoting Woody Allen; Amir crows to Jory, "We're the new Jews"; Jory favors Kissinger-style order over justice (perhaps a swipe at assumptions of "no justice, no peace" sympathies); and Emily tosses out a "you people." This particular incendiary mix of cultures and conditions blows wide open Amir's gorgeous, brick-terraced, classical-columned, ironworked apartment (designed by Jason Simms) that is littered with multiculti tchotchkes and totems.

There's a bit of the ambiguity of Yasmina Reza's Art here, but instead of imprinting one's own biases on a white canvas, this is more Pollock, a colorful, splattered, enormous abstract. Or is it more like the ambiguity found in Juan de Pareja's eyes, seen in the famous portrait painted by Velázquez of his slave/assistant that is obsessed over by Emily? Are these characters individuals or archetypes or both? Are religious texts outdated rules for desert living or vibrant, changing documents or both? Are we our ethnicity or our identity or both?

Mary B. Robinson's direction remains too formal for too long, minimizing the impact when it all goes south (although Kelly and Adair both bring an innate force to their roles). And yet, Akhtar prods the cultural landscape with such skill - adding offhanded mentions to everything from the Redskins to South Park's analysis of Mormonism - that there's more than enough food for thought left long after all those untouched dinner plates have been cleared away.

Philadelphia Theatre Company, Suzanne Roberts Theatre, Broad and Lombard Sts. Through Sun., Nov. 8. Tickets: $15 to $62.

Information: 215-985-0420 or PhiladelphiaTheatreCompany.org.