Religion, capitalism clash in Invisible Hand
Playing the markets is always a gamble. What if you are shorting pork bellies so you can keep filling your own?
In Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand, the degree to which financial, personal and political realities play out in a global marketplace is put under the spotlight. Pi Theatre’s Richard Wolfe directs the Vancouver première of this intense thriller that asks: How far will you go to stay alive?
“Ayad Akhtar is considered one of the most interesting and important American playwrights of the present time,” says Wolfe. “Of Pakistani-Muslim descent, his work came on my radar early and, around 2011, he wrote three plays around the identity of Muslims in the world and international finance. Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize, then there is The Invisible Hand and also The Who and The What.”
Each work looks at a different scenario that reflects contemporary cultural issues from Akhtar’s community and the greater global picture. In the Invisible Hand, an employee of City Bank in Pakistan is kidnapped by mistake by a group looking for a $10 million ransom. They think they have a senior executive. They don’t.
“And this guy, this mid-level banker Nick Bright, realizes he is a liability to the bank and that the ransom isn’t coming, but he can get $3 million and, maybe, make it much more,” says Wolfe. “So he’s trying to bargain his release doing what he did for the bank, but a guy from the militant group who is assigned to work with him proves a quick study. The kidnappers are not serious radicals; they are more interested in providing services to the citizenry in a system corrupted from top to bottom.”
Bright’s captors threaten to turn him over to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — the terrorist organization involved in the killing of journalist Daniel Pearl — if they aren’t satisfied. As the cash rolls in, so does its corrupting influence.
By the play’s end, the dual “religions” of Islam and capitalism comes to a resounding clash. Issues of community, convictions and cultural currency all come into the script in very real ways. To further enhance the experience of the show, Pi Theatre has once again commissioned composer Gord Grdina (Dan Mangan’s Blacksmith) to provide a unique soundtrack.
The Invisible Hand features Craig Erickson as banker Nick Bright, Shaker Paleja as Imam Saleem, Munish Sharma as Bashir and Conor Wylie as Dar.