A couple of years ago, Ayad Akhtar won the Pulitzer Prize for “Disgraced” — which is headed to Broadway this fall, with “How I Met Your Mother” star Josh Radnor.
“Disgraced” was typical awards-bait: a slightly didactic play about Big Issues — religion, tolerance — that came to a head during a dinner party gone horribly wrong. Akhtar’s new off-Broadway piece, “The Who & the What,” borrows many of the same themes, with feminism as the added special sauce. Too bad watching the show feels like being hit over the head with an earnest “teaching moment.”
Instead of a hotshot Pakistan-born lawyer, the lead this time around is Zarina (Nadine Malouf), the 32-year-old daughter of Afzal (Bernard White), a Pakistani immigrant who founded a taxi empire in Atlanta.
The Harvard-educated Zarina is trying to complete a myth-busting novel about women, Islam and the Prophet. But her liberated stance is out of sync with that of her pious dad.
For starters, he’s so gung-ho on controlling her marital prospects that he signed up Zarina — without her knowledge — on the dating site Muslimlove.com. Afzal even meets with potential suitors so he can screen them.
One of them is Eli (Greg Keller), a laid-back white guy who converted to Islam after reading “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and is now an imam. Surprisingly, the father and prospective son-in-law click. Even more surprisingly, Zarina likes him too, even though she’s against arranged marriages and was horrified by her father’s scheme.
The ticking time bomb is Zarina’s book. She breaks through her writer’s block to finish it, but her irreverent tack creates a huge rift with Afzal.
For all its thought-provoking themes, “The Who & the What” is dull. The characters have little depth, and behave exactly the way you expect them to.
Akhtar is actually more effective when he works within the romantic-comedy style: Afzal’s interviewing dates for his daughter and Zarina’s frank chats with her younger sister, Mahwish (Tala Ashe), have a sly sense of humor. They deal with integration without being heavy-handed about it.
The fun doesn’t last, though, and we’re quickly back in the after-school special. Akhtar has the potential to be a really good playwright — his dialogue can zing — but he needs to trust the audience to read between the lines.