Discussions Of Identity With A Mouthful Of Salad

"We introduced the salad yesterday and it's so funny that in this line of work the smallest stupidest thing can completely throw you," laughs Zindzi Okenyo. "You have to really time when you take bites because you can't be talking with heaps of food in your mouth."

It's the final week of rehearsals for Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, directed by Nadia Tass, which brings together American-born, Muslim-raised Amir (Hazem Shammas), a lawyer; his artist wife Emily (Kat Stewart); Amir's African American colleague Jory (Okenyo); and her husband (and Emily's art dealer) Isaac (Mitchell Butel), who is Jewish, for a dinner party that soon descends into a discussion about race, religion and identity.

"I haven't done a lot of naturalism, I've done a lot of really stylised theatre, so this is a new challenge for me but I'm really enjoying it," says Okenyo. While juggling her lines with a mouthful of salad is the current challenge, the first week of rehearsals had Okenyo - whose surname is used as her musical moniker — performing similarly dexterous feats. The actor and singer, having just finished a national tour supporting Urthboy, hit the rehearsal room in between two massive shows supporting Santigold.

"When I first started writing and performing my own music it was kind of confronting because as an actor I'm always in the guise of a character; always being myself, but through another."

"The audiences are completely different! My first live shows were touring with Jinja Safari years ago and it was amazing because theatre audiences, especially at a main stage level, you know, companies like MTC and STC, it's a certain kind of demographic and it's also very polite, there's a certain etiquette. Whereas with music it's a very different space, it's immediate and loud and there's a different kind of etiquette, or non-etiquette I suppose... I really enjoy going to those two worlds.

"I've been working slowly, slowly, for the last three years or so on the music side and the signing with Elefant Traks and my single 10 Feet Tall has really propelled me forward just recently. It's cool because it's the first time my two worlds are really overlapping, which was always my intention."

Okenyo has been acting professionally for a decade now, working regularly on stages, in particular for Sydney Theatre Company where she was a resident from 2009 - 2012, and appearing as a regular presenter on Play School. By contrast, music is a more recent pursuit for Okenyo, but one in which she displays as much promise.

"I've always wanted them to be able to happen concurrently. At first it was a bit overwhelming, but I'm getting used to it now. When I first started performing music I was definitely more going with the idea of being a 'persona', but as I look back I feel like that was a bit of a safety net, to be honest, and the more I write and the more I perform it makes absolute sense that being in my musician guise, I just totally need to be myself. That's been a very interesting journey because of the fact that I spent all my 20s in my job being someone else.

"When I first started writing and performing my own music it was kind of confronting because as an actor I'm always in the guise of a character; always being myself, but through another. But performing just as me, it's kind of terrifying, because you know if these people are critiquing this, good or bad, there's something about me personally."

Given the diverse cast of characters, a brief synopsis for Disgraced almost reads like the set-up for a politically incorrect joke. But these are not mere stereotypes, the cliches are contorted and undermined in order to pose deeper questions about personality.

"It's not necessarily a play about Islam, or a play about Jews, or a play about African Americans, or even a play about religion, it's about identity, and how we arrive at our identities," says Okenyo. "The question of the play is what is your identity, and how much do your roots - whether it's your upbringing, your ethnicity, a mix of the two - shape it? What is an identity and how does that actually manifest? What does that say about you and the way other people perceive you?

"Ayad Akhtar has copped a lot of flack for this piece because I think some people take it the wrong way, or think it's glorifying certain things, but it isn't. It is our responsibility to be part of a conversation, if you're making art you need to be making it for a purpose."