Ayad Akhtar's DISGRACED Wins the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

This year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama has been awarded to Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced, a play which premiered in Chicago in January, 2012, at the American Theater Company. Director Kimberly Senior then took the production to New York, where it played in the Clair Tow Theater at Lincoln Center from September to December, 2012.

Disgraced concerns Amir Kapoor, a Pakistani-American lawyer who has enjoyed a great deal of success within a prestigious New York firm. He lives on the Upper West Side in a beautiful apartment with a beautiful (white) wife, enjoying all the material accoutrements that accompany his status as a big-shot lawyer. To achieve that success, he's suppressed and hidden the parts of his identity related to Islam. But his wife, who is an artist, has incorporated Muslim motifs into her work. And when she throws a dinner party for a mixed group of guests, all those forces of identity, religion and culture collide.

As you can see from the poster image from Lincoln Center reproduced here, Aasif Mandvi from The Daily Show played Amir in the New York production. To see video clips from that production, click here or here (under the "Works" tab).

Other plays considered for this year's Pulitzer were Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn, which the Pulitzer committee calls "a searing comedy that examines the psyches of two women in midlife as they ruefully question the differing choices they have made," and Amy Herzog's 4000 Miles, "a drama that shows acute understanding of human idiosyncrasy as a spiky 91-year-old locks horns with her rudderless 21-year-old grandson who shows up at her Greenwich Village apartment after a disastrous cross-country bike trip."

Modern Love Is Messy in the Station's "Becky Shaw"

Gina Gionfriddo is another of the rising playwrights with a "Law & Order" connection. Like Theresa Rebeck, one of the most prominent "Law & Order" playwrights, Gionfriddo has also seen her work performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of its Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Gionfriddo's "After Ashley," about a father and son dealing with the fall-out (and the spotlight) that comes after a terrible crime rips apart their family, was a big hit at the 2004 Humana Festival, making Gionfriddo a finalist for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award and the John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award.

After "After Ashley," Gionfriddo made a splash with "Becky Shaw," her second Humana play, in 2008. "Becky Shaw" also got a New York run after its Louisville success, with the lovely Annie Parisse (who has a Law & Order connection of her own) in the title role, and the play made Gionfriddo a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. .

Given that the play is about flawed people in pursuit of love, strained finances, social classes and dubious parenting, the title of "Becky Shaw"  definitely conjures up Becky Sharp (conniving social climber) in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," with perhaps a little George Bernard Shaw (dryly funny social commentary on the mating game amidst the upper classes) on the side.

Gionfriddo's script is pointed and funny at some turns, murky and a little scary at others, as her plot veers off in unexpected directions and her characters continue to reveal layers we don't necessarily expect. In Kay Bohannon Holley's production for Urbana's Station Theatre, I was especially taken with the blind date scene, after newlyweds Suzanna and Andrew, still in the blissful in-love-with-love stage, fix up her adopted brother, Max, with Andrew's new co-worker, Becky, in what is instantly clear was a very bad idea.

Max is a dark and cynical financial planner who loves nothing more than verbally eviscerating his companions. He depends on his wit and intelligence, as well as the fact that he grew up in Suzanna's patrician Southern household to give him a patina of class, to put others in their place. And his blind date, Becky... Is no match for that at all. She is awkward, a little odd, poor, and working as an office temp. She doesn't have a car. She doesn't have a cell phone. She doesn't know how to dress or what to say or what other people's jokes mean. Becky is just plain wrong.

But Max takes her out, anyway, and they are mugged, setting into motion a series of increasingly complicated events. If at first it seemed that Max could eat Becky for lunch, well, Becky has some weapons of her own. Plus there's the small fact that Max is kind of in love (or as in love as it's possible for him to be) with his adopted sister, Suzanna; that Suzanna's mother, Susan, is difficult and cantankerous, too; that Andrew's savior fixation is also less than healthy; and that Becky's black hole of neediness may just be a big ol' con game. Oops.

Holley's staging gives this "Becky Shaw" a sense of urgency and crisp pace, with good interaction and conflict among all five characters. As Suzanna, the somewhat flighty woman in the middle of all the various relationship combinations and permutations, Lindsey Gates Markel never loses sight of her character's through line, pulling us along as well. Mike Prosise matches her well as Andrew, the teddy bear who just wants everyone to be happy, with Joi Hoffsommer adding an amusingly acerbic note as Susan, the fading aristocrat who keeps a boy toy but won't talk about money over dinner.

If Suzanna is the center of the play's universe, Max and Becky are massive solar flares sending heat and sparks all over everybody else. They're both mercurial, manipulative and verbal, in very different ways, and Mathew Green and Martha A. Mills negotiate that difficult terrain nicely.

Jadon Peck's scenic design is also a big asset to the production, with one higher level stage right for hotel rooms and a series of living rooms center stage on the floor. The triangular backdrops (rotated to change the scene from a small apartment to a crummy place and then a posh home) are particularly effective. The "soundtrack" compiled for the show is also spot-on for modern-day romance angst; it's apparently invited so many comments that the folks at the Station have shared the playlist at Rdio and Spotify.

I can't say I fully understand what Gionfriddo was trying to say with "Becky Shaw," but it is definitely a play you'll be talking about after you see it, as you try to puzzle out for yourself who the real villain is, who's lying when, who feels what about whom and why, and which relationships are worth saving. Very intriguing stuff.

BECKY SHAW
By Gina Gionfriddo

The Celebration Company at the Station Theatre

Director: Kay Bohannon Holley
Producer and Assistant Director: Katie Baldwin
Stage Manager: Bradley Ashby
Set Designer: Jadon Peck
Lighting Designer: Samuel Kearney
Costume Designer: Erin K. Miller
Properties Designer: Greta Miller
Sound Designer: David Butler

Cast: Mathew Green, Joi Hoffsommer, Lindsey Gates Markel, Martha A. Mills and Mike Prosise.

Remaining Performances: March 10-11 and 14-17 at 8 pm

Running time: 2:20, including one 15-minute intermission

For reservation information, click here.

Entertainment Marches On!

I don't know about going out like a lamb, but March is definitely coming in like a lion in terms of local entertainment. It's unusual to have so much happening on the very first day of the month, but that's the way it is for March, 2012.

If you want to go out tonight, you have a choice of great holdovers, promising new stuff, Oscar-winning movies, or a touch of legit* March Madness. First up, what's opening tonight...

Noël Coward's "Blithe Spirit" begins its run at Community Players tonight with a 7:30 Pay-What-You-Can preview. "Blithe Spirit" is, to my mind, Coward's best play, brimming with the wit and droll humor Coward is known for. Its plot involves British novelist Charles Condomine, who is married to a sensible woman named Ruth. But when Charles and Ruth host an unfortunate seance with eccentric Madame Arcati, they accidentally conjure up the spirit of Charles' blithe, beautiful, infuriating first wife, Elvira, who isn't too keen on leaving now that she's back. Uh oh. Now Charles is caught between two wives, one ghostly and the other very much alive and not very happy to be supplanted by an invisible rival.

"Blithe Spirit" is directed by Tom Smith for Community Players, with a cast that includes Thom Rakestraw as Charles, Hannah Kerns and Gayle Hess as his wife, past and present, and Judy Stroh as Madame Arcati. Performances continue through March 17.

Also opening tonight is the Station Theatre's production of Gina Gionfriddo's "Becky Shaw," a tart little comedy of its own. "Becky Shaw," whose title references Becky Sharp, the amoral antiheroine and best part of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair,"was a hit at the 2008 Humana Festival and enjoyed subsequent New York and regional productions. It begins with a terrible, terrible, terrible first date, a fix-up, played off against the pair of dewy-eyed newlyweds who fixed them up, commenting on love, romance, sex and sexual ethics in the modern world.

The acerbic humor of "Becky Shaw" is its strength, and it should do very well at the Station under the able direction of Kay Bohannon Holley, with Lindsey Gates Markel, Mathew Green, Mike Prosise, Martha Mills and Joi Hoffsommer in the cast. "Becky Shaw" opens tonight at 8, playing till the 17th.

Meanwhile, you have two other do-not-miss theatrical choices that are finishing up this weekend. People continue to discuss the problem of female playwrights not getting enough productions, but here in Bloomington-Normal, we have four more performances of Theresa Rebeck's snappy, dark and jaded "Mauritius," about sisters and shady wheeler-dealers battling over a valuable stamp collection, at Heartland Theatre, and three more performances of Caryl Churchill's sprightly but provocative gender-bent comedy "Cloud 9" at ISU's Westhoff theatre..

ISU also has two smaller productions opening tonight, with Vanessa Stalling and Matt Campbell directing Young Jean Lee's "Pullman, WA" and Heather Raffo's "9 Parts of Desire," respectively. Those two shows, more chances to support the work of female playwrights, play this weekend only, both closing on Sunday, March 4.

The women playwrights celebration continues at Illinois Wesleyan University, with April de Angelis's "Playhouse Creatures" taking a bow on March 6 in the E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre. Christopher Connelly directs this bawdy look at English theater in the 17th century, when women were first allowed to trod the boards (instead of men playing all the roles) and Nell Gwynn went from Orange Girl to theatrical star. IWU's box office page says there are only three performances March 6-8, which means you'll need to be quick on your feet if you want to see this one.

The Normal Theater offers a mini Woody Allen Film Fest with two of his best, "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and "Annie Hall" playing on the big, beautiful screen March 15-16 and 17-18, respectively. 'The Purple Rose of Cairo" stars Mia Farrow as an unhappy wife who loves to lose herself in movies, and Jeff Daniels as the pith-helmeted leading man who leaps off the screen into her life, while "Annie Hall" is the quintessential Allen romantic comedy, about a man very much like Woody who falls for a woman very much like Diane Keaton, and all the sweet, bittersweet and humorous quirks in their relationship.

On screen, the movie that just swept the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Oscars, "The Artist" is available right now in Champaign at The Art Theater, where they promise us that they have the only "beautiful 35mm print" in town. If you miss it there but want the vintage movie theater experience, you can try to catch it at the Normal Theater March 29-31. That was unconfirmed as of today, but the Normal Theater invites you to keep an eye on their Facebook page for details as the time gets closer.

New Route Theatre gears up for 2012 with its first "One Shot Deal," a reprise of "The Mystical Willie Lynch," Gregory Hicks' poetic exploration of the lasting repercussions of slavery on African-American history, on March 21 at the Eaton Gallery.

Over in Champaign, Parkland College's production of "Pinkalicious, the Musical," directed by J.W. Morrissette, continues through March 10, the University of Illinois opera program opens Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" tonight in Krannert Center's Tryon Festival Theatre, and the Champaign-Urbana Theatre Company (CUTC) will offer the rollicking musical comedy, "The Producers," directed by Mikel Matthews, beginning March 15.

Late in the month, Shozo Sato returns to U of I with his production of "Lady Macbeth: A Kabuki Play," conceived by Sato and written by Karen Sunde. The U of I Department of Theatre says that this take on Shakespeare "retells the Scottish Play from the power-driven perspective of the would-be queen." Further, "[w]ith this evocative production, the Department of Theatre joins the National Theatre Conference’s Initiative to Celebrate American Women Playwrights."

Good for you, U of I. And thank you, ISU, IWU, Heartland, and the Celebration Company at the Station Theatre, for doing your part, as well. I doubt that most of them are focusing on female playwrights on purpose, but even a happy coincidence is to be celebrated.

*Legit March Madness refers to high school basketball in Illinois, where the term "March Madness" was coined. I will tell you all about how that happened someday. For right now, suffice it to say that if I say "March Madness," I mean Illinois and I mean high school. This one's for you, H.V. Porter!