Disgraced

Presented by Huntington Theatre Company in association with Long Wharf Theatre. At BU Theatre,

Jan. 8-Feb. 7. Tickets from $25. 617-266-0800, www.huntingtontheatre.org

NEW YORK — Ayad Akhtar is intimately familiar with the ways that his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Disgraced’’ can make audiences deeply uncomfortable. He recalls sitting in the theater during previews for the play on Broadway in the fall of 2014 and watching a wave of shock wash over theatergoers’ faces as they grappled with issues involving politics, religion, and ethnicity in the words and behavior of its characters.

“There felt like a disorientation in the audience that I didn’t recognize and that I frankly didn’t love. It scared me,’’ says Akhtar, perched on a bar stool in a bright midtown bistro on a late Saturday afternoon in December. With a shaved head and a polite, easygoing air, Akhtar talks like an academic and jokes that he has a tendency to sound pretentious, a quality he tries to reign in.

“Disgraced,’’ which the Huntington Theatre Company stages Jan. 8-Feb. 7 in a co-production with the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, is full of challenges for an audience. In the play, a seemingly civilized dinner party among two well-educated couples in a tony Upper East Side apartment devolves into acrimony, recrimination, and bitter name-calling.

The central figure in the play is Amir, a hotshot corporate attorney who’s about to be made partner at his law firm when he reluctantly agrees to help an imam accused of funding terrorism, at the urging of his wife and cousin. That error in judgment threatens Amir’s professional ascendance, and his carefully ordered world begins to crumble.

A Pakistani-American who was raised in a strictly religious Muslim family, Amir is now an avowed apostate and evinces a variety of contradictory impulses. He warns that the fundamental differences between Islam and the contemporary Western world can’t be brushed aside. He calls the Koran “one very long hate mail letter to humanity’’ and argues, “There’s a result to believing that a book written about life in a specific society 1,500 years ago is the word of God: You start wanting to re-create that society. After all, it’s the only one in which the Koran makes any literal sense.’’ Yet Amir also acknowledges feeling a blush of pride on 9/11 watching Muslims fight for their beliefs.

Emily, Amir’s loving, WASPy wife, makes paintings inspired by Islamic art and urges Amir to embrace his heritage. The dinner party also includes Jory, Amir’s African-American colleague who harbors a secret, and her Jewish husband, Isaac, a self-righteous art curator who dubs Amir “a closet jihadist.’’ Emily later tells Isaac, “Sometimes you people . . . see anti-Semitism everywhere.’’ All the vitriol eventually leads to a shocking eruption of violence.

“Disgraced’’ explores the brewing clashes between ancient religious tenets and the modern world in post-9/11 America. It has become the most produced play at American regional theaters this season, with at least 18 productions staged nationally and some 40 happening around the world. Akhtar is also busy adapting “Disgraced’’ for HBO.

Despite its success, it has elicited angry, polarized reactions from theatergoers. Audience members have walked out, challenged Akhtar in post-show Q&As, and gotten into arguments with one another outside of theaters. A Muslim scholar ripped into the play while giving feedback to the cast in Chicago. And that all came before the recent terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.

“The play’s 90-minute concussive impact can belie levels of complexity in the design. In this particular climate it makes me uneasy at times, because I don’t know that people are thinking with nuance these days,’’ says Akhtar, 45. “I find that a lot of people don’t really understand the play. They think there’s a message. But the fortunate thing is that it seems to linger in the consciousness of many viewers.’’

During the course of the play, Amir’s identity conflicts come into sharp relief. He rejected his Islamic faith and cultural heritage and changed his last name years ago in order to assimilate, and he’s even been passing as Indian-American (and Hindu) with many colleagues at his Jewish law firm. However, he also acknowledges the difficulties in shedding earlier allegiances, and his devout cousin Abe (née Hussein) accuses him of self-loathing.

“He has built his house on a false foundation, as so many of us do,’’ Akhtar says. “He is partaking of that great American tradition of rupture from the old world and renewal of the self in the new world. But Amir, because of the political environment we’re caught in, is forced to deal with the consequences of the rupture. . . . You can’t build the house of who you are on who you wish to be. I would even go out on a limb and say a lot of our problems in American life come from this notion of ‘faking it until you make it.’ Once you make it, all you know how to do is continue to fake it. But life always brings you back to who you are.’’

For Akhtar, “Disgraced’’ is rife with paradoxes, leaving the audience unable to view the play consistently in any single way.

“So you could see ‘Disgraced’ as a critique of the upper-liberal classes. Or you could see it as a proposition that one can never escape one’s roots. Or you can see it as the conflict between dual loyalties. You could see it as a horrifying depiction of prejudice in the workplace. You could also see it as a confirmation that Muslims are savages. If you’re a devout Muslim, you could see it as confirmation that drinking alcohol, eating pork, and marrying a non-Muslim white woman is going to end you up nowhere good. You could also see it as an airing of post-Colonial historical grievances. There are multiple readings that can coexist, yet many of those readings don’t square with the others or don’t make sense together.’’

Rajesh Bose, who plays Amir at the Huntington after performing the role at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in the fall, calls “Disgraced’’ “perhaps the most intense piece of theater I’ve ever been part of.’’

“A lot of people have asked, don’t you feel that this play might reinforce fears or prejudices that people have about Muslims?’’ Bose says. “So in playing the part, I feel responsible to bring as much humanity as possible to the character, so that nobody walks away demonizing anyone in the play. That’s what keeps me up at night sometimes.’’

“Disgraced’’ is part of what the author sees as a seven-work thematic series (with three more still to come) that he believes “will be a pretty expansive picture of being a Muslim in the West at this particular cultural moment.’’ The four finished works include Akhtar’s well-received 2012 novel “American Dervish’’ and the plays “The Invisible Hand’’ and “The Who & the What.’’

In addition to a screen adaptation of “Disgraced,’’ he is writing a television series for HBO about globalization and capitalism centered on a fourth-generation family business. “I’m dramatizing the challenges of the globalized world,’’ he says, “through the eyes of the community that depends on this business’s health.

Akhtar was raised in a secular Muslim household in Milwaukee by Pakistani parents, both doctors, who emigrated to the United States in the 1960s. When he was in his early 30s, Akhtar began to realize that, like Amir, he “had been running from who I really was — in many ways running from my familial heritage.’’

“So as I began to turn to look at what I’d been running from, narratives just started pouring out of me,’’ he says. “All of the work I’m doing now still emanates from that period of inspiration, and I think the way America has changed after 9/11 is probably an important part of it.’’

Christopher Wallenberg can be reached at chriswallenberg@ gmail.com.