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Richard and I saw this play on Broadway on 12/26.  A friend at work had raved about it, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013 - - plus I got cheap tickets and it was 90 minutes long, so what did we have to lose?

 

The play is by Ayad Akhtar, and it’s about a Pakistani-born lawyer and his white bread American painter wife living on the Upper East Side.  The other characters are his nephew and their friends, a Jewish American guy and his African American wife.  The central scene is a dinner party for the two couples.

 

It was never boring, had some crackling energy, a few amusing zingers, and some high drama.  There were meaty roles for all five actors, and it was a treat to see Gretchen Moll (*The Notorious Bettie Page*) and Josh Radnor (*How I Met Your Mother*) onstage. But it felt like the author made a bullet list of the issues he wanted to explore, then invented five characters who could say those things.  As Karen Miller would say, “Just press play.”


Was it really such a slim year for plays, that this is the best play of 2013?

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