Busy playwright Ayad Akhtar finds his groove

In a sun-splashed rehearsal room recently at Lincoln Center, the knives were out for Ayad Akhtar's new play.
Its four-person cast and director were running through "The Who & The What" and it was agonising, start-and-stop stuff. Virtually every line was picked apart.
The most surprising thing was that the person with the sharpest knife was Akhtar himself, the author of "American Dervish" and the newly crowned Pulitzer Prize drama winner.
An actor stopped a scene to say he thought another character actually would not do something in the script.
"We'll see. We could cut it," Akhtar replied, genially.
At another point, the playwright took a line cut from an earlier moment and resurrected it, welding it into another scene.

He also sliced four lines from a character, explaining, "We've heard that 400 times already," and later stopped the run-through to admit that the sequence he wrote wasn't working.

"Guys, I'm sorry," he said. "Thank you for rolling with it."
Most playwrights would not be so keen to wield a scalpel to their own work, but Akhtar, one of theater's most vibrant, exciting young writers, is not precious about it.
"I don't experience it in my body until actors are doing it," he says.
"Their human flow is something I can only know fully when they start doing it. They give me feedback through the doing. Sometimes they give me feedback from the inside that I can't even know."

Akhtar, a Pakistani-American, has found rich material in the fault lines between East and West and his new play is no exception.
"The Who & The What" centers on a Pakistani- American writer whose potentially shocking novel about women and Islam threatens to tear her family apart.
A graduate of Brown and Columbia universities with degrees in theater and film, Akhtar is the son of doctors who grew up outside Milwaukee. Drama and friction were part of his everyday life.
"I grew up in a Punjabi house. Everyone's yelling at each other all the time," he says, laughing. "It's like the southern Italians of north India.