AYAD AKHTAR WAS RAISED IN TWO WORLDS. HIS PARENTS, immigrants from the Punjab province of Pakistan, created a home in Milwaukee. As a kid in the Midwest, none of Akhtar’s friends could point to his family’s home country on a map. His grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins visited from Pakistan, from England, from Kenya—all the places where the family had dispersed—and he grew up hearing from multiple communities that their respective ways of life were best. So he is, he says, “an outsider-insider”—a person who understands being more than one thing.
Even in his work, Akhtar plays many roles: actor, novelist, screenwriter and, most prominently, playwright. In 2013 he won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Disgraced. The play tackles that sense of simultaneous otherness and belonging, following Amir Kapoor,…
