Entertainment

Touchy topics, lousy party

Whenever there’s a dinner party in a play, chances are it’s going to end badly. Friends get together for a good meal, a nice bottle of wine. Next thing you know, someone insults someone else, and soon everybody is yelling at each other — usually about race, sex or religion.

It takes a great writer to transcend that cliché, and unfortunately Ayad Akhtar isn’t that great. Despite intriguing potential, his didactic new play, “Disgraced,” goes exactly where expected.

Amir Kapoor — Aasif Mandvi, an experienced actor better known for his stint on “The Daily Show” — is an immigrant success story. A corporate lawyer in $600 shirts, the Pakistani-American is being groomed for a partnership by his firm: “Leibowitz, Bernstein, Harris and Kapoor,” he daydreams aloud.

Things are swell on the domestic front, too: Amir is married to a WASP-y artist named Emily (Heidi Armbruster), and they share an elegant pad on the Upper East Side.

The main bone of contention between them is religion.

Amir has renounced a Muslim faith he finds barbaric, though he still knows the Koran better than most detractors — and many followers, for that matter.

When Emily waxes poetic about Islam’s “beauty and wisdom,” on the other hand, she thinks only about aesthetics, down to incorporating Islamic patterns in her paintings.

The tension between the assimilated Amir and his wife, who appropriates a tradition she only half-understands, is the strongest part of the show — and certainly the most unexpected. Mandvi and Armbruster make it even more interesting by suggesting a smarmy sense of entitlement that’s very effective.

Those bits also seem incisive because “Disgraced” is presented by LCT3, which is part of Lincoln Center Theater, and at times it feels as if Akhtar is holding a mirror to his prospective audience.

But then he dilutes his satire by adding targets: Amir’s African-American colleague Jory (Karen Pittman) and her husband, Isaac (Erik Jensen), a Jewish museum curator.

It’s not spoiling anything to say that when they all meet up at Amir and Emily’s for dinner, things don’t go well — for the guests or the show.

We end up in a game of Whack-a-Mole, with the playwright hitting issues instead of critters: There’s racism! Islamophobia on the right! Sexism on the left!

Making matters worse, the playwright and director Kimberly Senior confine the battle to a small table in a corner of the stage — couldn’t they make better use of the space by having the argument over the canapés?

By then you’re exhausted anyway, and start wishing a pox on argumentative lawyers, imams, painters, Upper East and Upper West Siders, and possibly every New Yorker unable to zip it at parties.