Ayad Akhtar talks with Madani Younis, artistic director of the Bush Theatre in London, where Disgraced opened in May 2013.
(A version of this interview originally appeared in the July/August 2013 issue of American Theatre magazine, published by Theatre Communications Group.)
MY: Last day in London. How are you feeling?
AA: Great. It was a very intense experience working with the cast here and the director. The play grew. For me, the outstanding dramaturgical issues that needed attention were addressed. And of course, the production turned out wonderfully.
MY: What did the play in London reveal to you that you hadn’t seen before?
AA: Nadia Fall brought a heightened quality, a ceremoniousness that was very different from the ease, the lightness of the New York and Chicago productions. Nadia’s production was appropriate for the London audience, where the theatrical space is more ritualized. Theater has a long, living tradition here as an art form. The feel of the London production was very different from those in the United States, where stage presence has to mirror film and TV presence to feel convincing. Kimberly Senior’s productions were wonderful, and right for the American audience. Different versions for different audiences. That’s probably as it should be.
MY: You recrafted scene 4 of Disgraced for this version. Why?
AA: One of the issues I was continually having with Disgraced over the last couple of years was the transition out of scene 3 into scene 4. I would sit in the audience in New York and feel that, after the intensity of the events in the third scene, the audience was still very much with the act of violence. We would start the fourth scene in a very tangential, narrative way, not clear what the connection was to what we’d just seen. And that connection wouldn’t be made clear for ten minutes. It was a long speed bump, during which I would feel some audience members shifting in their seats, like they were wondering what exactly was going on. It always seemed to me if there was a way to bridge that gap, to transition more viscerally, then we could get right to the meat of the fourth scene without the hiccup. The possibility of Abe coming in at the end of the third scene, as he does now, and then Emily and Abe showing up together at the beginning of the fourth solved the dilemma for me.
MY: This play is on at the moment here at the Bush Theatre, and it’s set box office records for us. We opened this show with an 80 percent advance on ticket sales over a seven-week run, which was unprecedented. Talk to me a little about your observations about a British audience confronting Disgraced.
AA: There’s an equal intensity of engagement, but it almost feels like the British audience is giddy with excitement at the end of the show. Jazzed. Not that they don’t go through the troughs and the emotional shattering; I mean, I’ve seen quite a few people wiping away tears, and I’m hearing the shocked gasps at the play’s key moments. But there’s an ebullience at the end of the show that feels different from New York, where there was a similar intensity, but a kind of quiet, a deep sadness, something much more recognizable as a response to tragedy.…
MY: What have your conversations with audience members at the end of the show been like? How do you think this play has connected with them?
AA: There’ve been two kinds of reactions. One is people coming up to me to acknowledge that they’ve had a meaningful and emotional experience. They often share that in a physical way, a facial way, and there isn’t too much commentary. And then there’s another reaction, having to do with the trouble the play seems to release into the audience, the folks who come up to me and ask point-blank what it is I’m trying to say. Because the play has not resolved that for them.
MY: Watching that is what’s fascinating. The play is a provocation. It is not a singular point of view that one needs to acknowledge. It’s not earnest in that regard; it’s far more complex. Let us for a moment talk about the violence in the play that is perpetrated by Amir upon his wife, Emily. What does that moment mean?
AA: Well, I want it to mean different things. It’s obviously playing into certain Islamophobic tropes. I want the audience to be so fully humanly identified with a protagonist who acts out in an understandable but tragically horrifying way, that no matter what text you put on top of it, you cannot dissociate yourself from him. So even if you put that Islamophobic text on top of it, it doesn’t change his humanity. That’s the subtlest level. But there are other levels as well. The psychological; the gender relationship in its religious dimension on the one hand, in its modern Western dimension on the other; and of course, the way in which what Amir does is an act of political violence, that is to say a colored male subject who is acting out on a white female love object through violence, and in a way rife with political valences. In that respect the play is drawing on a tradition of representation: Shakespeare and V. S. Naipaul and William Faulkner. I wanted Amir’s act of violence to be in dialogue with the acts of violence defined by that lineage. One of the things that’s problematic about the play to a lot of people is that certain readings of the play seem to undermine other readings. And so the question becomes, well, what is the reading of this play? My contention is that your reading of this play tells you a lot about yourself. And I’m reminded of that wonderful thing Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the New Wave German filmmaker, once said, about how he wished to create a revolution not on the screen but in the audience. One way you can do that is by offering something that is so troubling, so multivalent, that the people in the audience cannot easily answer or release the questions that the piece has raised for them. They remain compelled, even despite themselves, to continue trying to make sense of what they’ve seen. Inspired by Fassbinder, I would say: The play’s resolution lies not onstage, but in the consciousness of the audience.
MY: A hypothetical question, but one I feel duty bound to ask: What would the play become if it did not have the violence we witness between Amir and Emily? For that scene could occur with Amir walking out and leaving Emily standing alone in that space. What does that version of the play look like?
AA: I think that play is much more concordant with contemporary dramaturgical practice. Indirection, attention to the mundane, thwarted action. Those are qualities in some plays, but that’s not the play I wanted to write. I wanted to engage the audience in a way that was much more fundamental, more primal than the contemporary approach to catharsis allows. We often forget that Greek tragedy was a mass form, and a religious one at that, very different in emotional tenor to the detached, noble quality of modern tragedy. The kind of vital emotional and intellectual engagement I long to establish with the audience requires closing the distance between the play and its viewers. Disgraced draws on melodrama, potboiler, romantic thriller, situation comedy, because one way to close that distance is to have the audience relating to the play not as an object of art but as something closer to an entertainment.
MY: Let us just go back for a moment to interpretation and the ideas of interpretation. This play had its press night here at the Bush Theatre this past Wednesday, and in the last forty-eight hours, we have been inundated with some across-the-board very, very strong reviews from our newspapers. We’re seeing right-wing papers referring to this through a very particular lens toward Islam, and we’re seeing the left-wing papers referring to this in a far gentler, accessible sense. What has that made you think?
AA: That’s been my experience with this play in general. Again, my feeling was that in order to do what I wanted effectively—which was to connect viscerally with the audience—I had to do it in a way that was unmediated by the interpretive layers. After the fact, each member of the audience is going to scour their experience of the play for clues, but after all is said and done, they will end up using their own categories to understand what they’ve experienced. So it makes perfect sense to me that people would gravitate to whatever reading feels most familiar to them. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter, because there’s another kind of space that’s been opened up. An emotionally rich space, a space where opposing points of view, opposing readings of the play, can coexist. The success or failure of the play, as far as I’m concerned, rests in how alive that multivalent space is for an audience member. Let me give you an example. There was a Scottish-born Muslim woman of Pakistani descent who came to see the show a couple of nights ago who wrote me an e-mail saying, “It’s been two days since I’ve seen it, and I’m still deeply troubled. I find myself walking through the streets in a different kind of depression than I’ve experienced before, wondering what people are really thinking and really is there hope for the future?” On one level I could say: “Wow, that was a real downer. Why did I write a play that is such a downer?” Or on another level, though, we could say she has dropped down to another, deeper state of reflection about where the world is. A confrontation with the recalcitrant tribal tendencies we all harbor. That kind of clarity of vision—or openness to the possibility of clearer vision—this is the sort of thing for which I’m hoping the play can be a portal. Look, at the end of the day, art’s capacity to change the world is profoundly limited. But what it can do is change the way we see things individually. I aspired to accomplish with this structure a kind of shattering of the audience, after which they have to find some way to put themselves back together.
MY: Let me ask you, then, in response to what you’ve just said: Is the play hopeful or hopeless, from your perspective as the playwright?
AA: I’m not sure that it’s either. What it is, I hope, is an access point to a state of presence.
MY: For those in the world of the play, is there hope at the end of the play?
AA: I would repeat: I believe that in Amir’s case, as well as Emily’s case, and in his own way Abe as well, the events of the play have provided access to the present—to things as they are. That’s the only way we can change anything, the only way we can change ourselves. The only way we can change the world is by recognizing what it is, now.
MY: Let’s move on to my final question. As you know, I myself am Muslim, I’m Sufi, I’m British born. This is home. This country is home for me. For young Muslims who encounter this play, I can imagine they are surprised by the character of Amir.
AA: Sure.
MY: What are the thoughts that you leave young Muslims with about this play?
AA: It’s a problematic, complex, deeply troubling play. I’m not going to avoid that. What I would say is that the concussive impact of its very economical ninety minutes belies a complexity of design on a metaphorical level. The play begins with a Western consciousness representing a Muslim subject. The play ends with the Muslim subject observing the fruits of that representation. In between the two points lies a journey, and that journey has to do with the ways in which we Muslims are still beholden on an ontological level to the ways in which the West is seeing us. And what the play might be suggesting is that we are still stuck there. The play ends with Amir finally confronting that image. I do believe personally that the Muslim world has got to fully account for the image the West has of it and move on. To the extent that we continue to try to define ourselves by saying, “We are not what you say about us,” we’re still allowing someone else to have the dominant voice in the discourse.