Disgraced

I recently saw a revival of Ayad Akhtar's "Disgraced" in New York which is resonating in my brain still.  It is the story of a young successful lawyer on the way to making partner married to an artist who invite some friends who are also colleagues over to dinner.  He is the son of parents born in India, although due to the Paritition his mother was actually born in what is now Pakistan.  He himself, although a nominal Muslim, is not practicing because his education has left him deeply skeptical of the claims of all religions.  His wife is a pretty blonde WASP of no religious conviction either.  The story turns on her urging him as a liberal Upper East Side American would, to join a group of lawyers who are raising a defense of a Muslim cleric held on charges of terrorism.  He is reluctant to do this, not wanting to get the "taint" of being a Muslim around his office which is from his perspective a den of Jewish "old boys" whose sensitives toward Israel, as he sees it, would not take kindly  to Muslim intervention.  The WASP can't see the dilemma, the Muslim realizes that he is tarred with that brush if he does not always leave no doubt of his indifference to that faith.  A young angry nephew, alienated by America, and newly aware of his Muslim identity,  browbeats him into doing what the wife has been urging.  The friends who visit are a Jewish art dealer who is promoting the wife (and at a Paris art association outing sleeps with her) and his African-American wife who is also a young person on the make in the lawyer's office.  Too much scotch turns the evening ugly, with snide ethnic comments all around, terrible anger, and ultimately a hideous moment of out of control wife beating.  It is a very sad playing out of the theory of the Marked and the Unmarked where the WASP, the supreme Unmarked in our culture, urges her husband into a dangerous identification with a Muslim cause which has nothing to do with him but she thus "marks" him as Muslim, and thereafter his Jewish bosses do the same for that same association, thus profiting his fellow lawyer the African-American woman whom he "marks" as using the fact she is a "woman" and an "African-American" to leap frog ahead of him in promotions.  I have given a bare bones recital, but in the dramatic working out of every person's fight against someone else's definition, all the while making each his own definition of the other, you get the play's important story.  A long speech by the young nephew radicalized and aggressively Muslim about how his kind will never fit in is really the cry of the young immigrant as he confronts the aggressive energy of the older receiving population which insists upon defining each new person with a mark of identity as they struggle to make one of their own.