"The Invisible Hand" is a Sure-Handed Thriller

This is turning out to be Ayad Akhtar’s year. Of course last year, when his play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, wasn’t so bad for him either. But in just the past six months, Akhtar opened The Who & The What, a play about a Pakistani-American family, at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theater, saw Disgraced make its Broadway debut and, on Monday, opened his latest play The Invisible Hand, which is scheduled to run at New York Theatre Workshop through Jan 4. 

All three plays deal with the interaction between traditional Islamic values and contemporary life in a post-9/11 world. And no other writer in any medium is exploring this timely and complex issue with more honesty, insight and nuance than Akhtar does. 

Not all of it has worked. The Who & The What was more didactic than dramatic in its examination of the role of women in Islam (click here to read my review).  And while I thought the Lincoln Center production of Disgraced was the best thing I saw that year (click here for my review of it) the cast changes have drained some of the energy from the Broadway production.

Aasif Mandvi had bristled with the scrappy determination and sublimated anger of the Pakistani-born attorney in the play whose efforts to assimilate into the white world are thwarted after he makes a courtesy call on a jailed Muslim cleric. But the British actor Hari Dhillon who has taken over the role on Broadway is so refined and elegant that he seems like he’s already a member of the club who can treat the roadblocks the play throws his way as just minor annoyances (click here for an interview with the actor). 

Meanwhile, the famed dinner party scene in which the characters throw political correctness aside and painfully poke at one another’s biases is undercut by Josh Radnor, fresh off a nine-season run on the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” who seemed to think and act as though his character has the alpha role. 

My husband K hadn’t seen the play before and, on the basis of the performance we saw, couldn’t understand why I’d originally been so excited by Disgraced. So he opted not to see The Invisible Hand, which is too bad because nearly everything about this one shows off Akhtar at his best. 

The play opens in a room where an American banker named Nick (Justin Kirk) is being held by Islamic militants who want to ransom him for $10 million. The kidnapping is a mistake. The militants meant to take Nick’s boss and while the bank might have paid for the big honcho, Nick knows that it won’t do the same for him and he can only scrape together $3 million on his own. So he offers to use that money as a bankroll he will use to play the markets and make the rest. 

During that time, Nick attempts to bond in different ways—and with varying success—with his captors: his naive primary guard Dar (Jameal Ali), the more militant—and volatile—British convert to the cause Bashir (Usman Ally) and their group’s leader, the too-smooth Imam Saleem (Dariush Kashani).

Akhtar is a smart guy and a talky writer and this play, like his others, is filled with highbrow speeches about politics, religion and, in this case, economics (the hand referred to in the title is not God’s but Adam Smith’s). In fact, there’s so much talk about how the financial markets work that I felt at moments as though I were in an Econ class  and yet, the financial machinations are presented clearly enough that I might have passed a test afterward (click here for the chear sheet the theater has posted).

The Invisible Hand profits from Ken Rus Schmoll's pinpoint direction, which, aided by Riccardo Hernandez’s prison cell sets and Leah Gelpe’s drone-and firefight-filled sound design, maintains a convincing air of menace and suspense throughout the two-hour running time. He’s also cast the show superbly, particularly the two lead roles.

Kirk combines the cocky optimism that has allowed Nick to be a successful player in the world of high finance with the crippling fear of a man who knows he’s just one slip away from being killed. Ally, who impressed me back in 2010 when he played the Indian wrestler who was forced to dress up like Osama bin Laden, call himself The Fundamentalist and adapt a trademark move dubbed the “sleeper cell kick” in The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, is just as terrific as Bashir.

His physiognomy probably means Ally is constantly being asked to play a terrorist of one sort or another (click here to listen to another actor of Middle Eastern descent talk about that kind of pigeonholing). But here he breaks through the convention to create a guy who is funny one moment (and a fan of American pop culture) scary the next (and a critic of the way the U.S. treats the disenfranchised) but always recognizably human.

Recent events in Syria and Yemin bring extra currency to The Invisible Hand but the play and this production are deserving enough to be seen on their own right.

It Would Be a Shame to Miss "Disgraced"

It’s not easy to talk honestly about race.  And the fact that it’s no longer just a black-and-white issue in this country ups the degree of difficulty.  Still, many of today’s brightest young playwrights are taking up the challenge and the latest to shoulder it on is Ayad Akhtar, whose ambitious new play Disgraced opened at Lincoln Center’s still-new Claire Tow Theater on Monday night.

Its central character is Amir, who, like Akhtar, is Pakistani-American. Amir is also as assimilated as a guy can get. He’s Ivy League-educated and on the fast track to a partnership at a corporate law firm. He lives in a swanky Upper East Side apartment and is married to a WASPy blonde named Emily who has a promising art career. And his attitude towards Islam is determinedly casual, even a bit contemptuous. 

But the good life begins to unravel for Amir when, as a reluctant favor to his more religious nephew and his liberal wife, he pays a courtesy call on a jailed imam who has been accused of terrorist activities. 

The gesture causes the Jewish managing partners at his firm to doubt Amir’s loyalty. It unsettles the relationship with his friend Jory, an African-American woman who also works at the firm and whose husband Isaac is Emily’s art dealer. It strains his marriage.  But even more important, it causes Amir to question his identity as a Muslim in a post-9/11 America. 

All these issues collide in a liquor-fueled dinner party in which political correctness is abandoned, racial epithets exchanged and the rawest of emotions revealed.

That’s a lot to pack into a 90-minute play and I haven’t even gotten to the other problems in Amir and Emily’s marriage. Yet, despite a tendency towards some soapbox speechifying, Akhtar handles it all pretty well. 

That's because he's created credible characters who push beyond the usual stereotypes. The people in Disgraced are like most human beings, sometimes arrogant when they're right, defensive when they're not but most often stumbling through the murkiness inbetween those certainties.

Akhtar gets superb support from a five-member cast that is sensitively directed by Kimberly Senior.  Leading them is Aasif Mandvi who gives a kickass performance as Amir. 

Mandvi is probably best known for his satirical news reports on the “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” but he’s also an experienced stage actor with credits both off-Broadway and in the regional theaters (click here to read a Q&A with the actor) and he is outstanding in this complex role.

Kudos also must go to Erik Jensen, who stepped in at the very last minute to play Isaac when the actor originally cast got sick and had to drop out. Jensen had only been on the job three days when my friend Stan and I saw the show but he was not only off book but had already begun to turn Isaac into a distinctive character.

As we left the theater, Stan said he had enjoyed the play but he questioned whether people really talk like that, particularly about race.  I knew what he meant.  I’d felt much the same way after I saw The Submission (click here for my review) Clybourne Park (click for my review of it) and David Mamet’s defiantly named Race (and click for my review of this one) when I saw them.   

The truth of the matter is that despite all the rhetoric, we don’t really talk honestly about race.  Courageous plays like Disgraced remind us that we really need to find a way to do it.