The Invisible Hand strikes head-&-heart
All the basic condition theatre requires is that fire last night & those costumes 

& the human voice & people gathered together.  

Sir Trevor Nunn, Director (Cats, 1981 \  Les Miserables, 1985)

Quicky version

Another creation of American playwright Ayad Akhtar (whose script Disgraced won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2013), The Invisible Hand considers the religious fundamentalism of not only radical Islam but of capitalism, too, and how the fervors that infect each of these belief systems are not just parallel but in fact intersect.

With the arrival of what I have coined "jihadislam", North American audiences owe Akhtar Thanks! for his efforts to decryptify the Muslim religious / social / military / outlaw phenomena that daily blast their way into our psyches over the airwaves.

With comic riffs and layers of irony like layers of an onion -- the more you peel the worse it smells and the more it brings tears to your eyes -- this show doesn't mince words or sentiments. Our belief systems are built on words and driven by emotions. Emotions that have meaning to us but not necessarily any obvious or inherent moral superiority on the face of the earth. Akhtar lightens up his tale with humour and empathy and softness, but the underlying thriller aspect, the chance of the hero's brutal sacrifice at the hands of The Other, keeps you riveted to your seat.

Wordy version

From the footlights : Nothing like the potential for a bayonet beheading by hooded assassins to grab our attention. Or at least to operate metaphorically as "the invisible hand of fate" the audience imagines lurking behind Nick Bright. As a WASP investment capitalist working for NYC's mega-Citibank in Pakistan, Bright and his colleagues are all marked. In this case not yet marked to be a trophy for the local cult Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the violent Islamists who videoed the cruel and methodical and slow execution of journalist Daniel Pearl. For the moment, anyway, Bright is simply marked for a $10 million ransom by an imam who claims his intent is to use the money to improve his flock's living conditions in hopelessly corrupt Pakistan.

Another creation of American playwright Ayad Akhtar (whose script Disgraced won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2013), The Invisible Hand considers the religious fundamentalism of not only radical Islam but of capitalism, too, and how the fervors that infect each of these belief systems are not just parallel but in fact intersect.

Bristling with tension, the play takes place in a couple of residential holding cells as Bright tries to win his release by making his captors millions through stock market speculation. Along the way it's a seminar on how gazillionaires play the market, literally, with all its options, puts, calls, futures, short sells, long sells and the like that are 100% wizardry to arts majors like me. The Pi Theatre troupe producing the show at The Cultch is absolutely true to its slogan of Fearless Theatre.

How it's all put together :  The title is taken from 18th century laissez faire capitalist theorist Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) who posited that the bread on the family table gets there not by any beneficence on the part of its producers but by the economic self-interest of the farmers and the bakers who sell their product to said family. Thus, he said, "the invisible hand" of free markets will self-adjust through supply-&-demand dynamics : government need not get hamfisted with intervention, thanks.

Akhtar is less a propagandist than a provocateur, he would insist. A novelist and screenwriter as well as playwright, he disclaims advocating any single social, political or religious perspective. Summoning the classic dictum of the ancient, Horace, in Ars Poetica, he says his art aims to teach and to please, both. He told Alexis Soloski of The Guardian for a NYT feature piece in 2012 his goal in all his outputs artistically is that his work "be deeply engaging and alive and vibrant".

And just so TIH is. Nick Bright (Craig Erickson) has been held captive some three weeks when the show starts. Handcuffed, he's established amiable relations with his gaoler Dar (Conor Wylie) who clips Nick's fingernails. He's taught Dar to corner the south Pakistan farm market on cheap potatoes, stockpile them, wait until there's punishing demand up north, then sell his supply dearly. Oh, and do not confuse patriotism and money. Ditch your rupee profits, immediately buy $USD instead as it is the world's dominant currency.

Enter Imam Saleem (Shaker Paleja). He can't understand why Citibank (slogan : "Citi never sleeps") hasn't coughed up the ransom right smartly. One reason is Saleem's sect has been named a terrorist cell by the U.S. so ransom negotiations are forbidden by the State Department. Saleem's enforcer comes on as menace personified. 

Bashir (Munish Sharma) is a radicalized Brit national who's returned to his family's cultural roots to advance "the cause" once he latched on to Imam Saleem as his avatar. He threatens Nick with death at the hands of Lashkar. 

With Saleem and Bashir's patience at an end! over how Citibank has "gone cold", now there's but deafening silence from New York about Nick -- i.e. no talk of cash & no chat about Nick's safety -- just in time Nick convinces his captors if he can get his hands on a Mac he will do a workaround the ransom demand to Citibank. Instead he will access his personal Grand Cayman tax haven purse worth some $3 million. And parlay that offshore stash into millions more. For them. To buy his freedom. 

Let the fun begin.

What the show brings to the stage :  With the arrival of what I have coined "jihadislam", North American audiences owe Akhtar a big Thanks! for his efforts to decryptify the Muslim religious / social / military / outlaw phenomena that daily blast their way into our psyches over the airwaves.

Of Pakistani-American parents, both doctors -- and raised in Wisconsin just outside Milwaukee, as was I -- Akhtar is a bit of an obsessed artist these days. He's pumping out a play a year or more. TIH is to this viewer, anyway, considerably more compelling than was the plot and characterization of Disgraced that I accused of being just too-too in its myriad levels of coincidence. (Noting in my review, of course, that obviously the Pulitzer Prize judges disagreed with me in spades.)

Akhtar's obsession in this particular script about "the Muslim experience" is the nexus in moral compulsion between disparate groups of true believers. Wall Street hustlers on the one hand. On the other the Imam Saleem sect that professes to be all about doing good works for needy people. "We are prisoners of a corrupt country that is of our own making," Saleem admits to Nick. "You kidnapped me so you can fix your roads!" Nick responds incredulously. Quite so, apparently.

A racist himself, Bashir tells Nick he came "home" to Pakistan from the family flat outside London, like many of his generation, because "we are giving up our soft lives in the West to do something useful" for needy Muslim brethren back on old sod.

Nick is not allowed to handle the Mac laptop himself, so he mentors Bashir on how to play the market game : figure out an angle of political consequence; capitalize on it lit.-&-fig; create new and other conditions to maximize opportunity and results; repeat; repeat; repeat.

Along the way a kind of "reverse Stockholm Syndrome" occurs, Bashir admits, as he comes to befriend Nick as a person, not just as a mentor who is making him and Imam Saleem millions despite the fact that Saleem pays lip service to the notion that money, not religion, is the opiate of the masses as Marx had averred.

Which, TIH asks implicitly, is the greater cancer on society? Islam or capitalism? While it's clear the secular Muslim Akhtar doesn't favour jihad -- of Lashkar, Saleem remonstrates with Bashir : "They are not Muslims, they are animals!" -- he certainly does not kiss the capitalist blarney stone, either. 

Production values that hi-lite the show : Akhtar gives the play a kind of potboiler ending -- a bit of role reversal irony that had patrons around me chortling. Personally I find nothing risible whatever about that other Marxist tenet "the end justifies the means". But overall the show examines cleverly indeed how blind people can be when they conflate ideas such as market economy with democracy with freedom with religion (as the wild misnomer The Arab Spring attests to so profoundly). Or when folks cleave to social darwinism : survival of the fittest as a "fact of life" to accept, unquestioningly, whether on Wall Street or the sands of the wannabe caliphate in the Middle East.

Director Richard Wolfe [Artistic Director of Pi Theatre]  mined Mr. Akhtar's script well indeed. He and his actors utterly "got" the various levels of cognitive confusion and dissonance that arise world-wide. Americans don't see how they mix up democracy and money as one piece of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" that their famed Declaration of Independence promises. Many Muslims disparage the capital system but do all they can to get a piece of it for themselves. Distrust and fear are rampant. Exclusions abound. Violence is inevitable when frustrations mount past the tipping point. On a lighter note, Bright reminds Bashir : "Very few wars have been fought between countries that have McDonald's...".

Musical Director & Composer Gordon Grdina's work along with Sound Designer Christopher Kelly's finessing are worth going to hear even if one were masqued. With Fathieh Honiara's haunting cultural vocals and their appropriate wind accompaniment -- as well as the street soundscape of cars and dogs and overhead drones buzzing angrily above, bombing regularly -- this was all impressive. The set by David Roberts is imaginative and convincing Pakistan urban parched rockery-&-plaster with a rendition of the city's labyrinthine streets rising up cleverly behind the mainstage cloisters for prisoner Bright.

Acting pin-spots : The script focuses on two characters, Nick Bright and Bashir. And they each are terrific. Craig Erickson simply adds to his other recent Vancouver outings that were excellent as well : in the Mitch and Murray Mamet script Speed The Plow -plus- ACT's Scar Tissue. His execution, ugly pun acknowledged, of the staged pistol assassination scene to end Act I was utterly embracing frightening theatre. 

Munish Sharma as Bashir was a wholly engaging and genuine gestalt of emotions : bully-boy London tough with a great low-brow accent coupled with boyish nuance learning the stock market game. "What the fuck is a future?" he asks -- which in its normal meaning, not stock-market-ese -- is at the end what this show is fundamentally about. Solid performances by Messrs. Paleja and Wylie, too, both with delightful subtlety at key moments.

Who gonna like : With comic riffs and layers of irony like layers of an onion -- the more you peel the worse it smells and the more it brings tears to your eyes -- this show doesn't mince words or sentiments. Our belief systems are built on words driven by emotions. Emotions that have meaning to us but not necessarily any obvious or inherent moral superiority on the face of the earth. Akhtar lightens up his tale with humour and empathy and softness, but the underlying thriller aspect, the chance of the hero's brutal sacrifice at the hands of The Other, keeps viewers riveted to their seats.

Mr. Akhtar achieves his objective noted above thanks to Director Wolfe and the actors themselves, not to mention the insightful and incisive Akhtar script :  to "be deeply engaging and alive and vibrant". This is small stage theatre at its most relevant. Miss this and you miss insights that no number of news reports could ever provide.

Particulars : Presented by The Cultch as Produced by Pi Theatre (Vancouver). At The Cultch Historic Theatre, through April 23rd. Run-time 120 minutes, including intermission. Schedule information & tickets via thecultch.com or by phoning the box office after 12:00 noon @ 604.251.1363.  

Production Crew : Written by Ayad Akhtar.  Directed by Richard Wolfe [Artistic Director, Pi Theatre].  Set Designer David Roberts.  Costume Designer Christine Reimer. Lighting Designer Alan Brodie.  Musical Director & Composer Gordon Grdina.  Sound Designer Christopher Kelly.  Vocalist Fathieh Honari.  Stage Manager Jethelo E. Cabilete.  Dramaturge Adele Noronha.

Performers :  Craig Erickson (Nick Bright).  Shaker Paleja (Imam Saleem).  Munish Sharma (Bashir). Conor Wylie (Dar).

Addendum #1 : As noted above, Ayad Akhtar grew up in the USA town contiguous to where I grew up near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He in Brookfield, me to the west in Waukesha. Like me, too, he also has a tremendous affection and connect with where he grew up. 

He has done four collaborations with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre (the Rep) in the years since he graduated from Brookfield Central High. He took his play The Invisible Hand to the Rep two months back for a run.

Prior to its opening he sat down with Matt Mueller, the Pop Culture Editor of an e-zine OnMilwaukee for a chat. Excerpts that I think are relevant are included below.

OM : Do you believe capitalism is in a good place?

AA :  Capitalism is a religious ideology we believe because it's our ideological...it's our ideological blind spot. We think that it's true. We think free market liberalism is true. We think that it makes the world a better place. It's just what we believe. There's no evidence for that. It's what we believe. In that way, it's religious ideology.

I think I've been suspect of capitalism for a long time. I'm not a bleeding heart liberal, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that getting rid of capitalism is the solution. One thing that's often not known is that a lot of militant political movements around the world have taken their lead from Marxism and have done so for many years. At the core of a strain of Islamist militant thought is the desire for a more just economic world inspired by Marx. So the discourse you see historically with a lot of militant Islamic movements is very similar to the discourse of Occupy Wall Street and very similar to the discourse that Bernie Sanders has right now.

That's something people don't necessarily know, but that's because there's a strong strain of anti-intellectualism in this country. Issac Asimov put it very well when he said, "In America, it seems sometimes as if my ignorance is as good as your knowledge." There's this sentiment out there that I don't know shit, but it doesn't matter because I'm right. I don't care what you say or what the facts are, and we are suffering the consequences of that environment in our political life.

OM : And the Internet has only exacerbated that...

AA : Social media is probably the worst thing that's happened to American democracy.

OM : Really?

AA : If my ignorance is as good as your knowledge, then me posting my ignorance is an act of self-expression that deserves to sit side by side with a cogent, factual articulation of reality. That way lies madness.

OM : Yeah, on Twitter, there's no value of argument. It's a level playing field.

AA : There's no truth value.

OM : A New York Times article can be next to a racist rant from somebody on the same feed.

AA : Or outright ignorance. I think the truth value of language has ceased to exist in the public sphere. That's a crisis. That's no joking matter, because we're walking ourselves right off a cliff. These are real things. When your language has no meaning, you cannot communicate any longer.

We've got pipes in Flint (Michigan) that have been corroded by the process of privatization. We've got problems in this country that are so severe and significant, but the conversation is about a bunch of identity politics, and the people who are trying to deal with things in a concrete way are shouted out by people who think that our biggest problem is that we've got abortion rights or gun control issues. Forty per cent of American thinks Obama is a Muslim Kenyan king. This is a crisis in the national consciousness...

I'm not saying that social media is not something that could be used in a productive way or that it hasn't been used in a productive way. But for the most part, it has become the scourge of our national consciousness. It's a cesspool, and it's dragging the national conversation down with it.

OM : In a show like this, where you're dealing with these weighty ideas about global economies and ideological extremism, how do you balance explaining that to an audience while also keeping them invested emotionally?

AA : That's the challenge. Tell a good story. If you tell a good story -- that's first and foremost -- and keep the audience's interest, there's room for you to say some things and explore some ideas. But you have to keep your finger on the narrative pulse. You gotta tell a good story.

OM : Look at Shakespeare. People remember his plays because of the stories and the characters...

AA : And the language!

...not because they're commentaries or statements about something at that time.

AA : They remember Shylock because of those speeches, because of the language, because of the depth of the intelligence, because of the poetic flourish and the human window that that language opens up. I think that's exactly right.

I'm not writing to correct some idea that non-Muslim whites have. I'm not trying to make Muslims more palatable. I'm not trying to defend Islam. Islam is a great tradition that has lasted 1,500 years; it does not need the meager defences of a sometime-playwright. You know what I mean? I'm trying to fry a different kind of fish.

But because of my Muslim origins, because of the fact that my specific -- my Yoknapatawpha County, the county that Faulker used to write about -- is Muslim experience in America, that's my particular to which I'm writing toward the universal, toward the human experience, toward the contemporary global experience. It's just that I'm writing from this particular. But the particular gets mistaken for the content. Why? Because of this rampant environment of identity politics, which I am writing about but which I am not writing to.

Addendum #2 -- Pi Theatre mission statement that clearly is reflected in this production of TIH :

Pi Theatre produces bold and uncompromising plays that explore modern life. We connect audiences with theatre that’s intellectually alive and emotionally charged.

Pi promises work that pushes hearts and minds to their fullest extent. We are concerned with creating social moments, community connections and artistic impact.

We believe in work that extends beyond the stage to challenge perceptions and get people talking.

Our values:

Inspiration

Exploration

Excellence

Thoughtfulness

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