Week 11.2: Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced: A Play

Reading:
 Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced: A Play, 33-96

Study Questions:
1. What internal conflicts tear at Amir? How does this predetermine his responses to his spouse, coworkers, and friends?

2. Diagram the various ways that race, culture, and religion structure the relationships between the characters of Amir, Emily, Isaac, and Jory?

Week 11.1: Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced: A Play

Ayad Akhtar was born in New York City and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is a novelist and author of American Dervish, published in over 20 languages worldwide. His play Disgraced won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, ran on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, and was nominated for the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play. His plays The Who & The What and The Invisible Hand received Off-Broadway runs and are currently being produced around the world. Akhtar was listed as the most produced playwright for the 2015/16 Season by American Theatre magazine. As a screenwriter, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, the Sundance Institute, Ucross, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. He is also a Board Trustee at PEN/America and New York Theatre Workshop. Akhtar is currently the Resident Playwright with Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater. (Taken from the author's personal website)

Reading:

Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced: A Play, 5-32

Study Question:

1. Some key terms that are particular relevant to the first two scenes include: Assimilation, exoticism/Orientalism, hyper-visibility/erasure, prejudice, and tolerance. Select at least three of these terms and write a paragraph about how these ideas structure the budding conflict (agnon) of the play.  

How to Cite Plays

MLA (Modern Language Association) Style requires the use of in-text citations when quoting or referring to a source. To cite lines from a play, include the act number, scene numbers (as many as are available) at the end of the quotation if it is a verse play. Separate the numbers with periods, and use roman numerals.

(1) When a quotation from a play takes up four or fewer typed lines and is spoken by only one character, put the quotation marks around it and run it into the text of your essay. When quoting lines in verse (as in Shakespeare and Eliot), indicate line breaks with a slash. For example:

Two attendants silently watch as the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth subconsciously struggles with her guilt: "Here's the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand" (V.i.47-48)

Lady Macbeth feels anxious for her husband's lack of resolution; she claims, "Yet do I fear thy nature: / It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness, / To catch the nearest way" (I.v.16-19).

(2) When a dramatic quotation by a single character is five lines or longer, set it off by indenting one inch (ten spaces) from the left margin and omit quotation marks. Include the citation in parentheses after the final mark of punctuation. For example:

Lady Macbeth feels anxious for her husband's lack of resolution, claiming,
Yet do I fear thy nature:
It is too full o' th' milk of human kindness,
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness shoudl attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet would wrongly win . . . (I.v.16-22)

(3) When quoting dialogue between two or more characters in a play, no matter how many lines you use, set the quotation off from the text. Type each character's name in all capital letters at a one-inch (ten space) indent from the left margin. Indent subsequent lines under the character's name an additional quarter inch (or three spaces).

(4) When citing a play that either does not provide line numbers and/or is written in prose, you can cite page numbers instead of act, scene, and line numbers.