By Gary Sick.
New York Theatre Workshop’s world-premiere production of Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, directed by two-time Obie winner Ken Russ Schmoll, officially opens Dec. 8.
This new play about an American banker in the hands of radical Islamists is hugely entertaining, but its message is a daring departure from the conventional wisdom. Although it is full of insights – about Americans, financial markets, money, and terrorism – the reviewers see it as a metaphor.
Maybe. But it is also a brilliant portrayal of the terrorism business that is almost never acknowledged.First, a quick word to give this play its due. Ayad Akhtar is the only American (and yes, he is entirely American) playwright to have two plays presently appearing in New York at the same time.
This has happened before with Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, A.R. Gurney and no doubt others. But that says something about the company Akhtar is keeping. His previous play, Disgraced, which we saw two days ago, won the Pulitzer prize in 2013. I really thought The Invisible Hand was better.As it happens, the British playwright Tom Stoppard also has two plays running now in New York.
I have seen them both, and even as a die-hard Stoppard fan who once spent an entire weekend in London seeing one of his three play marathons, I think the Akhtar plays have a breath of life and explosive thrill that was missing from the (excellent) Stoppard plays now on display.
Akhtar has a future.Akhtar should be compared to the Angry Young Men of the British theater in the 1960s and 70s. He is not experimental, and his writing is instantly accessible. But he lifts the mask of convention and confronts us with the uncomfortable realities below the surface.The Invisible Hand is about the clash of civilizations, but not in any way you have ever imagined it.
Like Disgraced, it is not at all didactic or ideological. Akhtar manages to push all the cultural buttons, but he doesn’t take sides. Instead, the viewer is given all the gory facts and then challenged to make moral decisions. And Akhtar makes that process as hard as possible – just like real life. His message is moral ambiguity, and from the reviews I have read that may be the hardest to grasp.I did not see this play as a metaphor.
Instead, it explored the fact that the market has no ideology and no morality. Terrorists have the capacity to move markets. They know when a dramatic event is going to occur, and if they are sophisticated they can short the market and then profit hugely from the results of their own actions.
Saddam Hussein is widely reputed to have done this. He could issue a statement or a threat that would drive the oil market up or down. His brokers outside the country, who knew what was coming, could position themsselves accordingly and take a windfall profit when it happened. According to insiders, he was able to generate huge profits to compensate at least in part for the sanctions that had been placed on Iraq.
The market was neutral. It didn’t care if the investor was a hedge fund trader in Brooklyn or a secret representative of Saddam Hussein. If you were adept and had sufficient capital to play the game, it paid just the same. Are contemporary terrorists oblivious of their power?Without giving away the plot, that is a recurring theme in this highly entertaining and exciting play.
You will not nod off in the first act (as I have been known to do), and you will be kept on the edge of your seat and repeatedly surprised by the twists and turns of the plot.But you should remember that this is not just a symbolic exercise or a complex metaphor for modern life.
There are subtle messages throughout the performance that make you think about high finance, personal relations, bureaucratic stratagems turning into existential threats, and dilemmas that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been an employee – or a prisoner.It is a world. Go!
