News And Blogs

Watching theatre is one thing. Taking a performance to the next level and truly interacting with it is another. Anyone attending the Young Producers Circle Disgraced event on June 24, 2016 definitely partook in the latter....

Young Producers Circle Attends (and Interacts with) ‘Disgraced’

Disgraced is a play that everyone seems to be talking about across the country, from my family in Chicago to many friends here in L.A. I had heard about how the play dealt with contemporary faith and religion head-on. So when I received an email about Center Theatre Group’s Youth Theatre Forum for Disgraced on June 17, 2016, I got excited. Who do...

Students Discuss Faith, Identity, and ‘Art Activism’

According to Center Theatre Group (and playwright Ayad Akhtar) Disgraced is a play in one act. But for cast members, our Concierge staff, and hundreds of patrons every night of the play’s run at the Mark Taper Forum (which closes on July 17, 2017), a second act began after the curtain call. The post-show Stage Talks we have held after every perfo...

Stage Talks Bring Audiences Together After ‘Disgraced’

A writer exposes the anger and pain underlying his ethnic community’s post-war American experience through deeply flawed characters and cutting humor—bringing him equal parts adulation for his work and criticism for his portrayal of his people. This is the story of Ayad Akhtar and Disgraced, the most produced play in the country, which is onsta...

Ayad Akhtar Exposes Cultural Cracks

Equally heart-wrenching and incendiary, Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced (which plays the Mark Taper Forum through July 17, 2016) poses “thorny questions of identity and religion in the contemporary world” (Charles Isherwood, The New York Times) that confound not just the characters onstage but the audience members watchin...

Diving Deep Into ‘Disgraced’

Playwright Ayad Akhtar knew he wanted to be a writer at the age of 15. Until that time, Akhtar—the son of two doctors—was sure that his destiny lay in the world of medicine. Then his high school literature teacher changed his life. When I met her, she was in her late 50s. She’d been through five husbands. She lived on 40 acres of land north o...

Asking the Deep Questions with Ayad Akhtar

Emily is a painter whose work is heavily influenced by Islamic art and incorporates Islamic forms. She is also a white woman married to a Pakistani American man named Amir. In Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced, onstage at the Mark Taper Forum through July 17, 2016, Emily is accused of Orientalism by Isaac, a curator at New York’s...

The Islamic Art of ‘Disgraced’

Critics and audiences across the country (including the Pulitzer Prize committee) have been raving about Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced since its 2012 premiere. But Disgraced and the actions of its characters are not without controversy and can be difficult to watch at times....

‘Disgraced’ Does Not Apologize