Not even underwater, on BART in the Transbay Tube, could the events of Friday the 13th in Paris be swept from view. You could watch streaming live accounts of the growing body count in the palm of your hand. This was a train to the theater, where so often respite is found, yet by unnerving coincidence, this was not to be one of those nights. Disgraced, Ayad Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning play at Berkeley Rep, may be set in a luxury New York apartment handsomely designed by John Lee Beatty, but what its occupants are confronting have chilling resonance to what was happening overseas.
Like so many plays in which affable members of the affluent society come to blows, verbally or physically, the combustion starts with a dinner party at which peace reigns about as far as the appetizers. The two couples are clearly well-versed in multiculturalism. The hosts are a Pakistani-American corporate lawyer and his white-on-white wife, who is exploring Islamic ideology in her art, despite her husband's disavowal of his birth religion. The guests are a secular Jewish art dealer and his African-American girlfriend who is a lawyer at the same firm as her host. A United Nations, at least through the fennel and anchovy salad.
Seemingly innocuous banter begins to prick away at veneers of a gloriously assimilated melting pot, and the cocktail-fueled characters begin to reveal resentments that are usually sequestered in some internal vault. Escalating attacks are shared but not equally distributed. The focal character is Amir Kapoor, who has strategically let his law firm believe him to be Indian rather than Pakistani. While the others try to offer up some revisionist interpretations of the Quran, Amir will have none of it, describing the holy text as "one long hate letter to humanity."
But the playwright suggests there is something primal in all of us that may well not ever be in full harmony. Yes, Amir admits to gasps, he felt a hint of pride on 9/11 for the cunning success of his ancestral people, and in a fit of anger at the Jewish art dealer, he provocatively suggests Israel might deserve to be wiped off the map. The art dealer, after an angry shove from Amir, declares that all Muslims, secular or not, are barbarians at heart.
In a secondary story, a brief effort to help an imam arrested for possible terrorist connections lands Amir's name in the newspaper and dashes his chance of making partner at Leibowitz, Bernstein, and Harris. When the job goes instead to his African-American colleague and dinner guest, he shouts at her, "You think you're the nigger here. I'm the nigger." More gasps abound, and they won't be the last.
At first, Akhtar's dialogue is surprisingly wan in the bantering stage, and Bernard White as Amir and Nisi Sturgis as his wife don't seem much interested in it either, in director Kimberly Senior's production (she also directed the 2014 Broadway staging). Sturgis never does become a fully vital presence on stage, which is not true of the other performers. White provides slowly revealed nuances to Amir, a character of contradictions he may not even realize he has. J. Anthony Crane is a bright presence as Isaac, the convivial art dealer, though he darkens ominously as a devastating collision approaches. The stylish Zakiya Young as Isaac's girlfriend has a smaller role, but is the strongest voice of conciliatory propriety.
But prolonging that kind of peace is not the case the playwright is making. There are times to keep your mouth shut, Akhtar seems to be saying, but it is what festers unspoken that will ultimately hurt the most. At the end of the opening-night performance, following a traditional curtain call, the cast returned to the stage and, without a word, bowed their heads in silence. The audience didn't need words to understand what was being said of this sad day.
Disgraced will run at Berkeley Rep through Dec. 20. Tickets are $29-$89. Call (510) 647-2949 or go to berkeleyrep.org.