Disgraced

Ayad Akhtar's 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Disgraced, controversially confronts the politics surrounding cultural identity in the US, post-9/11. While Nadia Tass directs a slick, almost televisual production for Melbourne Theatre Company, this narrative remains a deeply unsettling portrait of both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in contemporary America.

Pakistani-American Amir Kapoor (Hazem Shammas) is an ambitious corporate lawyer. He considers himself an apostate Muslim - or is it self-denial, or perhaps self-loathing? Kapoor is married to the presumably WASP Emily (Offspring's Kat Stewart) - an artist. Em is the kind of daffy, idealist Diane Keaton depicts in Woody Allen films. The pair, living on New York's Upper East Side, throw a dinner party for Jory (Zindzi Okenyo), Kapoor's African-American colleague, and her Jewish husband, Isaac (Mitchell Butel) - an important art dealer Emily is cultivating. Kapoor has been drinking, stressed about a media report inaccurately linking him to the legal defence of an imam charged with sponsoring terrorism. When the party's conversation turns to Islam, the tension rises fast. Discord between friends (and marital strife) ensues. This one-act play never gets dull.

Okenyo is especially riveting with her savage wisecracks. But, although Disgraced's ostensibly liberal, middle-class characters freely air their ugly underlying prejudices, there's minimal critique - and Akhtar risks reinforcing damaging stereotypes. The most unjustly extreme of these is that Muslims are all potentially violent. Disgraced renders the post-racial American Dream into a brutally intersectional Hunger Games.

Until 1 Oct.