Ayad Akhtar

Playwright

• Born: October 28, 1970
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Contribution: Ayad Akhtar is a playwright and author best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning play Disgraced (2012) and the novels American Dervish (2012) and Homeland Elegies (2020).

Background

Ayad Akhtar was born in New York City but raised in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Akhtar said in an April 2012 interview on the Tavis Smiley Show that his was the only Muslim or Pakistani family in the immediate area for most of his youth. His parents, a cardiologist and a retired radiologist, relocated to the United States from Pakistan in the 1960s and later settled in Wisconsin due to employment opportunities.

Akhtar’s interest in writing began in high school, but primarily due to self-doubt, he put the idea of becoming a writer aside after a brief stint at the University of Rochester. He discovered a talent for acting after assisting a friend with a production of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago and ended up majoring in theater and religion at Brown University. At Brown, Akhtar acted, directed, and produced a number of theatrical productions including The Winter’s Tale and Maids. Following graduation, Akhtar spent a year in northern Italy, where he studied under renowned Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. He later went on to live briefly in Germany and France. In 2002 Akhtar completed a graduate degree in film at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Career

After graduating from Columbia University, Akhtar’s first success was as an actor and screenwriter. He starred in the television film The War Within (2005), which tells the story of a Pakistani engineering student who transitions from secularism to terrorism. The independent film, cowritten with two of Akhtar’s friends from Columbia, was nominated for a 2006 Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay. In 2011 Akhtar appeared in the HBO television film Too Big to Fail, about the American financial system.

Akhtar eventually returned to writing, even completing a novel, though he regarded this initial attempt as an inferior work that he preferred not to publish. He explained in interviews that he failed to draw on his personal life and experience in his early writings, but as he evolved as a writer, he learned to utilize his history to guide his fiction. This resulted in his first published novel, American Dervish (2012). It incorporates elements of Akhtar’s own life and experiences to illustrate the spiritual and cultural crises of his characters.

American Dervish tells the story of Hayat Shah, a Pakistani American preteen growing up in a secular family in Milwaukee during the 1980s. Shah feels little connection to his family’s Islamic heritage until a family friend, Mina Ali, fleeing from government repression in Pakistan, comes to stay with the family and begins to teach him about his religious heritage. Akhtar told Mary Houlihan for the Chicago Sun-Times that he purposefully wrote American Dervish to be a coming-of-age, family drama, fitting the stereotypes of this genre but through a Muslim lens, helping readers to experience the different ways of approaching Islam. In an appearance on the Tavis Smiley Show, Akhtar said that the book presents three perspectives on faith: a literalist orthodox adoption of faith, a rational humanist rejection of faith-based rules and orthodoxy, and a mystical approach to faith as an avenue toward personal, emotional expression.

Akhtar’s one-act play Disgraced, which debuted in Chicago in January 2012, tells the story of Amir Kapoor, a corporate attorney who has been hiding his Islamic origins from his Jewish colleagues. When Kapoor decides to assist in defending an imam who has been wrongfully accused of a crime, his cultural history and background are revealed, and Kapoor must then deal with the effects of his Islamic heritage becoming known. The play’s tense dinner-party setting was partially inspired by a real-life situation Akhtar and his former wife had once experienced. Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013 and was one of the most critically acclaimed plays of the year, bringing Akhtar much attention.

In a 2013 interview for the Washington Post, Akhtar said he hoped that Disgraced represented an important new direction in American theater, displaying what he called the “viability” of characters of minority race and/or identity to be the primary protagonists in serious theater and film. The New York City stage performance of Disgraced starred Aasif Mandvi, best known for his role as a comedic reporter on the mock television newscast The Daily Show.

Akhtar followed Disgraced with more plays, including The Invisible Hand (2012), and Junk: The Golden Age of Debt (2016). Similar to Disgraced, The Invisible Hand also deals with a South Asian professional caught between the Western world and his Islamic faith; it won a number of awards, including an Obie Award (for off-Broadway plays) and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Junk, which has a purely financial theme, opened on Broadway in 2017 and was nominated for the 2018 Tony Award for best play. Akhtar earned the Steinberg Playwright Award in 2017.

In September 2020 Akhtar was announced as president of the literary and free-speech organization PEN America. That same month saw the release of his second novel, Homeland Elegies. Once again, the work draws significantly on the author's own life in telling a story about identity and Muslim American experience—the protagonist shares Akhtar's name and several aspects of his background, though the book is ultimately a work of fiction. The novel received an overwhelmingly positive critical response, with many critics and outlets listing it as one of the best books of the year. It won an American Book Award and was among the finalists for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

In 2021 Akhtar was awarded the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction by the New York State Writers Institute, which named him the New York state author for the year.

In 2024, his play McNeal opened on Broadway. The play featured Oscar winner Robert Downey, Jr., in his Broadway debut as the title character. McNeal is a writer with real talent and potential who also deals with issues related to his estranged son.

Impact

Akhtar became a significant figure in the American literary scene, with great success both in drama and fiction. He received particular acclaim for work that is semiautobiographical or based on parts of his own cultural experience as a Pakistani American growing up in the Midwest. In a 2012 interview featured in the magazine Islamic Monthly, Akhtar said that there has been a long tradition in the West of defining Islamic individuals in a way that allowed for a collective sense of justification regarding Western colonialism in Islamic countries. While Akhtar did not define his work as “activist” literature or theater, he uses his characters to explore various aspects of the way in which Islam is portrayed and represented in American culture and delves into how individual lives are affected by this ongoing cultural struggle.

Personal Life

Akhtar lived in New York City for years before buying a home in the Upstate New York town of Kinderhook in 2019. He described a number of unusual practices aimed at helping him to maintain his creativity in the writing process, including keeping a chair in his office where he imagines his primary characters sitting as he writes. Akhtar, who was previously married and divorced, became engaged to director and actor Annika Boras.

Bibliography

"About." Ayad Akhtar, ayadakhtar.com/about. Accessed 27 Jan. 2022.

“Actor-Writer Ayad Akhtar.” Tavis Smiley. Smiley Group, Inc., 26 Apr. 2012. Web. 3 July 2013.

Houlihan, Mary. “Debut Novelist No Stranger to the Writing Experience.” Chicago Sun-Times. Sun-Times Media, 2 Feb. 2012. Web. 3 July 2013.

Lee, Benjamin. "Robert Downey Jr to make Broadway debut this year." Guardian, 7 May 2024, www.theguardian.com/stage/article/2024/may/07/robert-downey-jr-broadway-play-mcneal. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Levingston, Steven. “Q & A with Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize Winner in Drama.” Washington Post. Washington Post, 19 Apr. 2013. Web. 3 July 2013.

McNeal, mcnealbroadway.com/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Schwartz, Alexandra. "An American Writer for an Age of Division." The New Yorker, 14 Sept. 2020, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/an-american-writer-for-an-age-of-division. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Soloski, Alexis. “A Writer’s Unusual Rituals Yield Results.” New York Times 23 Sept. 2012: AR6. Print.

Al-Shawaf, Rayyan. “An Interview with Ayad Akhtar.” Islamic Monthly. Global Engagement Group, Summer/Fall 2012. Web. 3 July 2013.

“2013 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music.” New York Times 16 Apr. 2013: A18. Print.