Some changes in “The Invisible Hand” are very invisible indeed. Following its initial success at Westport Country Playhouse in 2016, Ayad Akhtar’s gripping drama has been remounted at TheaterWorks by its original director, most of its designers and three of its original four cast members.
Those of us who admired the production in the first place can see things we haven’t seen before. The play still has a powerful impact even if you know its shock ending.
If you haven’t seen “The Invisible Hand” before, it’s the latest in a series of worthwhile sociopolitical provocations (which include “Sunset Baby” and “The Call”) which are ideal for TheaterWorks’ intimate stage and up-for-anything audiences.
Adam Rigg’s original scenic design, which sprawled across Westport’s wide proscenium stage, has been downsized and modified by Kristen Robinson into a tight, boxy set that suits TheaterWorks’ lower-slung thrust-stage situation. The setting is a prison cell, and it has an overhanging ceiling that adds to the sense of confinement. In TheaterWorks’ closer quarters, everything needs to look sturdy and scuffed-up and impenetrable, and it does. The metal doors squeak wonderfully.
You can see faces and bodies more clearly too, from scowls to arched eyebrows to bruises. Everything’s tighter, at a more realistic scale.
How much does this help? Well, there was a moment in “The Invisible Hand” back at Westport that I found so false, so stagy, that it soured me on a whole subplot of the show. It involves a man removing something from a wall. At Westport, he had to move the object far enough away from the wall so that it could be clear to the whole audience what he was doing. The action was meant to be secretive but the staging made it blatant.
Now, in the intimate confines of TheaterWorks, with its thrust stage and raked auditorium, physical gestures don’t have to be magnified. Covert moves stay covert.
That said, “The Invisible Hand” can get too loud too for its now-smaller space, and Kennedy’s production also gets too loud too soon for maximum dramatic impact. That was an advantage of the original Westport rendition of “The Invisible Hand.” Playwright Ayad Akhtar’s dialogue needs to be savored, and the distancing of a proscenium stage can help you focus. Here, shoutiness disarms and distracts.
Akhtar’s nuanced script lets the actors — Eric Bryant as Nick, American investment banker and Fajer Kaisi, Rajesh Bose and Anand Bhatt as the three revolutionaries holding him captive — get to argue in a number of different ways. These range from calm disputes to sucker punches. Firearms are brandished.
The captors take issue with being branded as a terrorist group. They insist that they are just trying to bring positive social change to their community through food programs and new irrigation systems. But they are not sterling moral leaders. They expose their prejudices and insecurities and their desire for power. When Nick’s financial know-how earns them hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single short session, greed enters the equation.
“The Invisible Hand” is a clear, detailed lesson on the power, and danger, of high-stakes international finance. It’s also a highly physicalized action thriller. David Kennedy accepts this, and plays up the punchy parts without diminishing the complex explanations of selling short, exchanging currency, laundering money and maneuvering bull and bear markets. Adam Smith, Karl Marx and the Quran are quoted.
At the heart of both the financial and political arguments are basic questions of conscience and morality. There’s also a sense of dignity. Akhtar understands that even though this is a captor/hostage relationship, over time that relationship can change so there is respect, curiosity and even chumminess. The menace never subsides, but the characters have a lot of quiet, interesting exchanges while stuck together in Nick’s small cell.
Nick’s main contact is Bashir (played by Fajer Kaisi), a well-educated, arrogant radical who helps the banker trade stocks from the confines of the cell. Nick is being forced to raise his own exorbitant $10 million ransom by doing what he does best: playing the market. Rajesh Bose (who appeared in a much different role in a different Akhtar play in Connecticut, “Disgraced” at the Long Wharf Theater, eight months before doing “Invisible Hand” in Westport) plays the cryptic leader of the radical faction, Imam Saleem. He vacillates between gracious waves of his hand and vicious threats. Anand Bhatt, who wasn’t with the show in Westport, brings a brightness and energy to the proceedings as the loyal guard Dar, starting with his first energetic lines at the outset of the drama. This is the kind of play where moments of calm and niceness can be harrowing harbingers of horrors to come.
Moods change throughout the two-hour play, tempered by survival instincts and lurking suspicions. Eric Bryant, as Nick, is the one who must roll with the emotional turmoils. Nick needs to live, needs to see his family again, but also pleads that he needs to work. He begs for tools like a Nexus/Lexus subscription as avidly as he does for his own life.
If you already saw “The Invisible Hand” in Westport, its TheaterWorks remount will show you a few new angles, and almost certainly show you areas of the drama you might have overlooked the first time. If you haven’t experienced the play yet, brace yourself for an excoriating look at politics and business that’s part social satire, part morality play and part contemporary horror show. A worthy return, “Invisible Hand” demands to be seen.
THE INVISIBLE HAND by Ayad Akhtar, directed by David Kennedy, runs through June 23 at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $45 to $70. 860-527-7838 and theaterworkshartford.org.
