Disgraced, an Obie and Joseph Jefferson Award winner and recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, will open on Broadway this fall, producers announced today. Celebrated for its depiction of a successful corporate lawyer forced to confront his reasons for hiding his Pakistani Muslim heritage, Ayad Ayhtar's drama will begin previews on September 27 for an October 23 opening at the Lyceum Theatre produced by The Araca Group and Lincoln Center Theater.
The New York Times called Disgraced "a continuously engaging, vitally engaged play" that "bristles with wit and intelligence," while The Times (London) said it was "riveting" and "zings with provocation, wit and understanding." When an Upper East Side lawyer and his artist wife have another couple to dinner, polite table conversation erupts into intense debate. Though Amir has abandoned his Muslim heritage, believing it doesn't work in the modern world, internal conflict leads to external drama.
Hari Dhillon starred as Amir in the London production and will return in a cast that also features Gretchen Mol, Karen Pittman and How I Met Your Mother's Josh Radnor. Pittman appeared in the 2012 staging of Disgraced with The Daily Show's Aasif Mandvi at Lincoln Center's LCT3. Kimberly Senior directed that production and will helm the play's Broadway bow.
Ayhtar is having a busy year. Besides Disgraced he has two other plays making New York debuts this year, The Who and the What at LCT3/Lincoln Center and The Invisible Hand at New York Theater Workshop.
He is also a novelist (American Dervish, Little, Brown & Co.). The War Within (Magnolia Pictures), a film he co-wrote and starred in, was internationally released and nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay. As an actor, he appeared in HBO's Too Big to Fail.
Though best known as Ted Mosby in TV's How I Met Your Mother, Radnor has appeared on Broadway before, in The Graduate opposite Kathleen Turner and Alicia Silverstone. Pittman's Broadway credits include Good People and Passing Strange, and Mol made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago in 2004.
