play

I was invited to attend the play, titled ‘Disgraced’ by Ayad Akhtar on 17 November 2016 at the Singapore Repertory Theatre. It was a novel experience for me, to catch such ‘cultural’ performance.

The synopsis of the play as follows:

The play was set in New York City, circa 2011/2012. The protagonist, Amir Kapoor, has worked hard to achieve the American Dream. With South Asian Muslim roots, he has gone on to become a successful lawyer, has a beautiful American wife, Emily.

But when Amir hosts a dinner party for his African American colleague, Jory, and her Jewish husband, Isaac the initially pleasant evening erupts into a volatile argument over race, religion and class in the modern world.

Through the interesting dialogues between the characters, it reveals the various perspectives and interpretation of race, religion and discrimination.

There were already numerous reviews and critique of the play, where various writers expressed the social-political issues they picked up from the play eloquently – such as the feasibility of the American Dream for the non-white people; the nature and purpose of faith, the stereotypes of Muslims; the threat of radicalisation; the need to renounce one’s cultural identity in the name of assimilation and gain acceptance; upward mobility and so on.

Personally, I thought that the play is disconcerting. I have never been to America, but through this play, I think I have the sheer ugliness of the….

The protagonist, Amir, was an apostate, who had renounced his Islamic faith and changed his name. Throughout the show, Amir projected a bitter man with intense self-hatred, identity crisis and uttered blasphemy about Islam. The source of his anger is fear – he was acutely aware and sensitive to the discrimination against Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks; and was afraid that his racial profile will overshadow his talents and performance and ruin his career progression.

In contrast, Amir’s wife, Emily, embraced and idealised the Islamic traditions. Owing to the privilege of being a White person, she is blithely unaware about the discrimination her husband faces, nor able fathom the intensity of her husband’s turmoil.

Towards the ending of the play, Amir snapped as he felt that the world was against him. His worst fear of being passed over for the promotion because his employers felt he was a professional liability due to his roots, being unjustly branded as an ‘Jihadist sympathiser’ when he attended a hearing of a local Imam, and the shame of learning that his wife had an extra-marital affair. While ‘understandable’, I felt that the portrayal of domestic violence committed by a “Muslim man” in the play may not augur well in the current climate of distrust, and might reinforce the negative stereotype among those who already have such misgivings.

While majority of us acknowledge the importance and fragility of racial harmony, our community is becoming more stratified due to inequalities – the privilege gap, the racial & religious faults, and the different aspirations and value systems among people.

The status quo – racial tolerance – is fragile. This was evident in the play where a simple dinner among four ‘liberal minded’ professional adults escalated into a dramatic and intense conflict.

Few feel comfortable about having an honest conversation about our difference, out of fear of offending the other party, and inciting unnecessary problems such as being branded as a racist. Stereotypes arise as human has the primal instinct to make snap judgment for ‘survival’ – deciding arbitrarily based on hearsay or assumptions of other groups of people. But we have to be aware of our own inherent prejudices and biases, to avoid discriminating and hurting others.

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Review: DISGRACED, by Ayad Akhtar