By Ayad Akhtar. Directed by Janet Wright. An Arts Club production. At the Stanley Industrial Alliance Stage on Wednesday, September 23. Continues until October 18

Although both this script and this interpretation are engaging, I wanted the production to make me believe that the play is better than it is.

In Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning drama, a Pakistani-born and thoroughly assimilated corporate lawyer named Amir is hosting a dinner party in his lavish Upper East Side apartment with his painter wife, Emily. Emily is on track for inclusion in a show at the Whitney, and their guests are Isaac, the show’s curator, and Jory, his partner, who works at the firm where Amir is also employed.

Although Emily is a WASP, her art draws on the Islamic tradition, for which she has great respect. But Amir, who was born into a Muslim family, doesn’t share her reverence: he refers to the Koran as “one very long hate-mail letter to humanity”. Still, Amir’s loyalties are conflicted: the fennel and anchovy salad really starts to fly when he admits that, although he was appalled by the violence of the 9/11 attacks, he couldn’t help but feel a blush of atavistic pride as well. “I forgot which ‘we’ I was,” he explains.

It’s a nicely complicated setup. But the script is schematic: every character has a tidy relationship to Islam and sociopolitical displacement, and they become mouthpieces. Emily is the intellectually curious but naive liberal. Isaac, who’s Jewish, reacts with outrage to any expression of sympathy for radical Islam. And Jory, who’s black, shares Amir’s outsider status, but is none too thrilled when he declares himself the real nigger in their law firm. Amir’s nephew Abe becomes the model of increasingly radicalized youth.

Performances of profound emotional depth could complicate and elevate the script. Amir is Othello in a way, a successful figure who constantly has his difference forced upon him. Patrick Sabongui does very fine work as Amir: confidently plotting a credible trajectory, he’s at his best when Amir starts to get drunk and more dangerous. That said, Sabongui doesn’t raise the stakes to the level of tragedy: in his portrait, we don’t see a man who’s brought down by his arrogance, we don’t register early rumblings of his unresolved rage, we simply see a nice guy who surprises himself.

Kyra Zagorsky’s Emily is honestly and shockingly vulnerable in the script’s most extreme moments. In Zagorsky’s contained work, Emily’s intelligence is always clear, but depths are hinted at—lust, for instance—that go largely unexplored.

Marci T. House plays Jory as a scold. Her performance is funny and true, but greater playfulness might effectively mix things up. Conor Wylie is impressively assured as Abe. And Robert Moloney’s Isaac is the most relaxed figure on-stage. The character is a loudmouth, but it would be great to see what would happen if more of the actors let it rip.
The luxurious set is by Ted Roberts.

Disgraced is current. This production is solid. It could all be better.