“DISGRACED” is a sensational title for a play, but even those on the inside of the Sydney Theatre Company’s upcoming production of Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama are not exactly sure which characters in it are disgraced.

It’s nothing to do with sex as in JM Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace”, so maybe it’s us, middle-class audience members, who are disgraced.

Even Sachin Joab, who plays the central character Amir, agrees with one critic that “you don’t know which character Akhtar is hiding behind”.

It could be Amir, a secularised American Muslim of Pakistani origin or his WASP American wife Emily or his African-American workmate Jory or her Jewish husband Isaac or his nephew Abe, or a combination. At all events, in a schematically-arranged dinner party that marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it’s not so much “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” but would the real bigot please stand up?

Joab, born in Australia to parents from Kerala in India, is not a Muslim, but he did grow up in suburban Melbourne with friends of all cultures – Sunni, Shia, Christian and Buddhist – so understands what Akhtar’s play is about, especially as it touches on intolerance and the middle-class masked variations of it.

Trained conventionally at the National Theatre School in St Kilda, Joab thought of himself as a stage actor, but quickly discovered, like many multicultural performers before him, how conservative Australian theatre can be when it comes to casting. “There were so many roles I know I had the goods to play,” he says, also deploring the way he was expected to put on thick accents.

Advised by his mum to look to screen work, in 2011 he scored the role of Ajay Kapoor in the TV show “Neighbours” under the watch of an enlightened director, enjoying accolades until he and other multicultural actors found themselves mystifyingly written out of the series. But why?

“Casting is not representative of this country,” he says.

Fed up, Joab took off in 2013 for the US, where he quickly found an agent and a job in the film “Reversion”, where he played an art dealer, a role any American could have played.

But now he’s got the plum role in Akhtar’s intellectually sizzling play and has found himself facing questions about racism and Islamophobia. It’s complex, to say the least.

Set in a super-fashionable New York apartment during September, 2011, we meet corporate lawyer Amir, whose over-enthusiastic Muslim parents’ views have led him to break away from the faith and modify his Muslim name from Abdullah to Kapoor. He’s called an “apostate”, but in reality his Muslim upbringing is very close to the surface.

Amir is married to white American Emily, infatuated with the art and culture of Islam. “She sees the leaves on the tree of Islamic culture”, Joab says, whereas Amir, who once knew the Koran by heart, “is talking about the roots”.

When he is persuaded to defend a local imam accused of radical activity, the truth comes out over the dinner table where the guests are Amir’s African-American co-worker and her Jewish husband.

As they traverse every subject from the Talmud to Ahmadinejad, things turn nasty, especially when the armchair Orientalism of Emily comes face-to-face with Amir’s sneaking admission that he felt a moment of Muslim pride in events of 9/11. Mistakenly, he imagines he can air this around the dinner table.

He can’t. In a play that ripples with questions of identity politics, race and religion that are just as resonant for modern Australians as for Americans, it asks just how “progressive” we really are.

“Disgraced”, The Playhouse, June 22-25. Bookings to canberratheatrecentre.com.au or 6275 2700.