Pulitzer Winner ‘Disgraced’ to Open on Broadway

NEW YORK — Ayad Akhtar‘s Disgraced, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, will open on Broadway in the fall, with a cast that includes Hari Dhillon, Gretchen Mol, Karen Pittman and How I Met Your Mother star Josh Radnor.

A critical hit in its 2012 off-Broadway debut under the umbrella of Lincoln Center Theater’s LCT3 program for emerging artists, the play landed on a number of publications’ top 10 New York theater lists for that year, including The Hollywood Reporter‘s. A Broadway transfer has been brewing ever since.

The one-act play explores with insight and wit issues of faith, race, identity and social politics in a climate conditioned by fear of terrorism and radical Islam. It centers on a Pakistani-American corporate lawyer professionally tarnished by his reluctant association with a persecuted imam and forced to acknowledge the ethnic background from which he has chosen to distance himself.

Related Stories

Arts

Broadway Box Office: 'The Music Man,' 'A Strange Loop' Close on a High Note

Arts

'A Streetcar Named Desire' Theater Review: Paul Mescal Makes an Explosive Stanley Kowalski in a Brutal Revival

STORY ‘Disgraced’ Honored With 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

The role of the lawyer, Amir, was played to great acclaim in the earlier production by actor-comedian Aasif Mandvi. However, Amir will be played on Broadway by Dhillon, reprising the role from the hit London production. Mandvi was unavailable due to his schedule on the upcoming HBO series The Brink. Pittman is the sole cast holdover from the play’s earlier New York run.

Kimberly Senior, who directed Disgraced in its original production at Chicago’s American Theater Company as well as for LCT3, will make her Broadway debut on the transfer. Produced by the Araca Group and Lincoln Center Theater, the play begins previews Sept. 27 at the Lyceum Theater, with official opening night set for Oct. 23.

Akhtar’s new play, The Who & the What, which examines the family conflicts that explode around a talented Pakistani-American writer’s novel about women and Islam, opens June 16 at the Claire Tow Theater in an LCT3 production also directed by Senior.