Race, religion over dinner
New Stages holds a reading of the Pulitzerwinning Disgraced, with most of the Mirvish cast
The Page on Stage Reading Series returns to New Stages at Market Hall Sunday evening with a reading of Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar. It happens at 7:30 p.m. The play is a Pulitzer Prize winner for drama and played Broadway as well as being a hit during the past Toronto theatre season as part of the Mirvish season – such a hit both critically and with audiences that it is returning in the coming season.
The story is based on a question: What if what was truly inside you was forced to come out?
In the play, an ambitious lawyer has turned his back on his upbringing to pursue a “successful” life.
But when he hosts a dinner party, what begins as a casual, witty evening with friends and co-workers explodes into a battleground over race, religion and class in the post-9/11 21st century.
“Everything I write is a combination of lived experience or observed experience,” Akhtar told The Canadian Press last year. “I’m not writing from theory. It’s really I’m just observing people in my life and my family and I’m also observing myself and I’m sort of creating narrative out of those observations.”
Akhtar, who is of Pakistani heritage, was born in New York City and raised in a Milwaukee suburb where there weren’t many Muslim families.
“It was very open-hearted and accepting,” he said. “They didn’t know where we were from but they didn’t really care too much, because it was OK, wherever you were from was fine,” he told CP.
“Times have changed in this country, certainly in Wisconsin…. I feel like there’s a lot more rage and a lot more suspicion of others, but growing up I never experienced that myself.”
For this reading, the original Canadian cast of the Mirvish production will be taking part, with an addition: Alex Poch-Goldin, who is also a playwright and wrote 4th Line’s popular Road to Pontypool and The Bad Luck Bank Robbers, will take the part originally played by Michael Rubenfeld in Toronto. Raoul Bhaneja, Birgitte Solem, Karen Glave and Gabe Grey, all accomplished theatre, film and television actors will recreate their roles.
He has explored similar themes in other works, including the novel American Dervish and the plays The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand.
Tickets are available at the Market Hall Box Office, by phone at 705749-1146; and online at tickets.markethall. org.