The Invisible Hand at The Cultch

When Ayad Akhtar's Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced played the Arts Club's Stanley Theatre last fall, I was nonplussed by the production and frankly perplexed as to all the critical kudos trailing the play--which seemed to me over-plotted and rife with cliches about Muslim-American men (you can read my review here). Now comes Pi Theatre's Canadian premiere of Aktar's follow-up drama, The Invisible Hand, which is on at The Cultch's Historic Theatre through April 23rd. I still think Akhtar has a problem with endings, with this one thrown at us like an abrupt cliff edge as opposed to Disgraced's overly tidy circularity. Nevertheless, I felt more invested in both the characters and the issues being explored in this play, which in its probing of the links between global finance and global terrorism and its distilling of the history and economics of a western country's involvement in a so-called "failed" Muslim state registered to me as Akhtar's theatrical attempt to do for Pakistan what Tony Kushner tried to take on with respect to Afghanistan in Homebody/Kabul. Then, again, maybe it's just that Akhtar is better at suspense than domestic melodrama.

The play opens with a quiet tableau whose visual juxtapositions are rife with meaning: a machine gun-toting Dar (played by Conor Wylie, who also appeared in the Arts Club production of Disgraced) is standing over a seated and handcuffed Nick (Craig Erickson, who is on stage for the entire length of the play). Dar holds Nick's raised hands in his, and at first it appears that the two might be praying together; instead the captor is merely cutting his prisoner's fingernails, which along with Erickson's growth of beard neatly telegraphs for the audience that Nick has been held for some time. Soon the two men fall into a stilted conversation, with Nick asking after Dar's mother; things get more animated, however, when Dar thanks Nick for some previous financial advice, which apparently allowed Dar to make a tidy profit on some stockpiled potatoes. However, the connection between the two men is sundered by the entrance of Bashir (Muish Sharma), who knows about Dar's transaction and is not happy about it, beating the younger and physically smaller man and accusing Nick of corrupting him with visions of the almighty American dollar.

For Nick, it turns out, is a futures trader at Citibank; he is being held prisoner after a bungled kidnapping (they were supposed to get Nick's boss). The $10 million ransom being demanded for his release has not yet been paid because, as Bashir explains, the leader of their organization, Imam Saleem (Shaker Paleja) has just been labeled a terrorist. But as Saleem puts it to Nick when he finally appears, he is not motivated by the religious extremism of either the Taliban or the even more militant Lashkar-e-Jhangvi organization (the ones responsible for the execution of journalist Daniel Pearl). Instead, he is on a crusade to rid Pakistan of corruption, in part by circumventing the normal channels of government aid and finding a way to give money directly to those in his community most in need. This is where the play gets interesting. Recognizing that his captors no longer see him as an asset, Nick proposes to Saleem and Bashir that he be allowed to use his skills as a trader to raise the ransom himself, parlaying an initial input of capital from his personal offshore Cayman Island accounts into a stock portfolio that would see all profits going to the Imam in exchange for Nick's eventual release. Soon enough Bashir is seated behind a computer, with Nick advising him about "puts" and "options" and, above all, the sublime beauty of the short sell.

In these core scenes between Nick and Bashir, Akhtar certainly indulges in his obvious knowledge of economics. Nick, for example, schools Bashir in the intricacies of the Bretton-Woods agreement (upon which he wrote his senior Princeton thesis), which put in place the first global monetary system post-WW II by tying the currencies of independent nation-states to a gold standard backed by a fixed exchange rate of American dollars. Curiously, however, Akhtar leaves unstated the other part of the contemporary global financial equation, namely when Richard Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard in 1971, an event that has allowed the US Federal Reserve to respond to perceived financial crises at home as it sees fit (by, for example, raising or lowering interest rates, or printing more money). However, Nixon's move also paved the way for unscrupulous traders on Wall Street to short investors on Main Street (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, anyone?), as well as to take advantage of unstable situations abroad by buying up worthless stocks and properties and converting everything into American dollars--what has come to be known (after Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and other texts) as "disaster capitalism." We see precisely this intersection of the "free market" and political crisis play out when, having been tipped off that the Minister of the Interior will be the target of violence, Nick has Bashir buy up various water-related stocks and then sell them as the price begins to fall. In these scenes, which sometimes become a little talky, Sharma and Erickson display an easy chemistry mixed with the heady intoxication of profit, like they are old bros bonding over a bet they have just won--in this case one worth $700,000.

Things take a twist in the second act when, having attempted a bold escape, Nick is now tied to a ball and chain, albeit in far posher digs (the wonderful set is by David Roberts, who almost does as good a job here as Drew Facey, who designed Pi's Jessie Award-winning production of Blasted last season). He and Bashir are still working together and still reeling in the profits, with Bashir now a seasoned trader savvy to the ups and downs of the market. Indeed, having been alerted by Nick at the end of the first act about Saleem's suspicious personal withdrawals from their accounts, Bashir appears to be putting in place a set of contingency plans as the $10 million benchmark for Nick's release approaches. Meanwhile Saleem also returns to warn Nick of the consequences should he be plotting some sort of double cross with Bashir. And all the while the American drones are getting closer and closer. It is to Akhtar's credit that he keeps us guessing until the end about who is most playing whom among this triumvirate. And the ending, as clunkily as it arrives, is thematically satisfying, if only for the way in which it shows us how well Bashir has absorbed Nick's lessons.

Under the direction of Richard Wolfe, the play steadily accrues tension and depth, and the scene transitions are additionally enhanced by the amazing vocalizations of Fathieh Honari (Chris Grdina is responsible for the music; the sound effects are by Christopher Kelly). Wolfe also elicits terrific performances from the entire cast, especially Sharma and Erickson. Sharma is a big man and he plays on that physicality by taking up and claiming space--including, in one especially funny scene, Nick's bed. Sharma also manages to convey in his lower class English accent and his violent temper how much of his character's extremist politics are grounded in the racism and poverty he experienced growing up in Houndswell, outside of London. Erickson negotiates Nick's transitions between fearful vulnerability and blustery bravado with tremendous skill. No matter the life and death situation he is in, Nick can't help succumbing to the addictive lure of the next trade--which is often where capitalism and terrorism fatefully (and often fatally) intersect.

P.

Disgraced at the Arts Club

The Arts Club's Bill Millerd is certainly consistent in his programming choices, including when, for his largely subscription-based audience, he goes out on a limb and programs a "risky" play at a mainstage space like the Stanley. Having achieved success three years ago with Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, a caustic comedy about contemporary racial and economic politics in Chicago (and about which I blogged here), his season opener at the Stanley this year is Ayad Akhtar's Disgraced. Like Norris' play, Akhtar's tackles head-on the issue of race in twenty-first century America; also like Clybourne Park, Disgraced comes to town bearing the imprimatur of a Pulitzer Prize and trailing lots of critical acclaim. Finally, this production of Disgraced is directed by the venerable Janet Wright, who also helmed Norris' play for the AC, and both productions share two cast members: Marci T. House and Robert Moloney.

All the winning ingredients for a repeat success. And yet I still left last night's performance extremely disappointed. The fault has less to do with the AC's production per se, which is snappily directed and for the most part well acted. The fault for me lies with Ahktar's script, which sets out to critique binaristic readings of what it means to be a Muslim-American man today, but ends up re-entrenching those binaries--often in extremely disturbing ways.

The play focuses on Amir Kapoor (Patrick Sabongui, making an assured AC debut), a successful New York lawyer of Pakistani descent. Amir, who long ago changed his last name from Abdullah, is an assimilated Muslim man who claims to abhor the fundamentalist ideology of the religion in which he was raised. However, his wife Emily (Kyra Zagorsky), a painter, finds inspiration for her art in Islamic tile-work and architecture, and even in the spiritual teachings of the Qur'an. Complicating matters further is the presence in the couple's life of Amir's nephew Abe (a very effective Conor Wylie). Like Amir, Abe has changed his name (from Hussein); but unlike Amir, Abe has not completely turned his back on his family and his community, and he has arrived at his uncle's doorstep seeking his help regarding the apparently illegal incarceration of a local Imam. Amir does not want to get involved and in the course of explaining to his nephew and his wife his problems with the Muslim faith, Amir recounts the story of his fifth-grade love, Rivka. When Amir's mother found out about the flirtation she told him he couldn't be involved with a Jew and spit in his face; later in the school hallway, when Rivka approaches him, he tells her that he can't see her anymore because she is a Jew and likewise spits in her face. It's one of many moments in the script that elicits a gasp from both of Amir's on-stage and off-stage audiences. But it's also an example, as we shall see, of Ahktar's framing of Amir's apparently available choices--acquired culture-blind liberal tolerance vs. the weight of family and religious inheritance--in impossible black and white terms.

Nevertheless, at Emily's prodding, Amir says he will look into the Imam's case and when, later, he is quoted in the New York Times about the brief, he begins a paranoid unravelling in which his neatly compartmentalized professional and personal lives start to overlap in increasingly combustible ways. That this is accompanied by a dinner party with his black colleague Jory (House) and her Jewish art curator husband, Isaac (Moloney), only ups the ante. We met Isaac in a previous scene, when he came to look at Emily's paintings, and now three months later, following a trip together to London to attend the Frieze Art Fair, Emily is hosting this dinner in hopes that Isaac will announce that he's including her in the upcoming Whitney Biennale that he is organizing. This is duly disclosed, but there are more revelations over the course of the evening: that Jory has made partner at the law firm, for example, whereas Amir is on the verge of being fired; and, most clunkily, that Emily and Isaac slept together while in London.

As in Norris' Clybourne Park, Akhtar is interested in using the well-worn conceit of domestic melodrama to rip away the polite veneer of race relations in America. But whereas everyone is made to look bad in Norris' play, the climax of Disgraced presents the audience with the picture of the Muslim man, having struggled in vain all his life to suppress it, discovering and unleashing his backward animal savagery, his inner jihadist--that part of himself that, as he puts it to Isaac after more than a few drinks, felt a "blush of pride" when the Twin Towers fell. My problem has less to do with Akhtar's suggestion that in a post-Patriot Act America the Muslim man is positioned between two impossible poles--assimilation or extremism--than with his overly-obvious and even cliched telegraphing of Amir's disgrace. So, for example, the story about Rivka is there in the first scene to set up the moment at the end of the play when Amir spits in Isaac's face; and the dinner-table argument with Emily about what the Qur'an has to say about wife-beating makes all the more inevitable the blows he lands upon her body when she confesses the truth about her affair with Isaac.

Clybourne Park and Disgraced are both "social problem plays" aimed squarely at a mainstream audience. Which means that complex issues like race and cultural difference to a certain extent get reduced to screaming matches, with everyone given an equal opportunity at outrage and boorish behaviour. But in Norris' play not only was the added context of class brought into the equation, the plot was also wedded to a two-act structure that created even more tension and depth through historical and dramatic parallelism. Akhtar is also aspiring to marry form to content, and the play concludes with a coda in which Abe/Hussein returns, newly radicalized and once again seeking his uncle's legal advice--this time in connection with his own arrest and questioning by the FBI. However, both the circular structure of Akhtar's play and that of fundamentalist ideology arguably conspire here to confirm rather than to challenge cultural stereotypes.

It's certainly not what I expected from this play--especially given what I'd heard about it and the playwright in advance. I am hoping that Pi Theatre's production of The Invisible Hand in April offers me a different perspective.

P.

Pi Theatre's 2015/16 Season

I don't usually blog about theatre companies' season announcements. But Pi Theatre's 2015/16 season is of special interest to me--and not just because AD Richard Wolfe is directing the other Ayad Akhtar play in Vancouver this year.

Richard is also helping me workshop a little performance venture of my own! Details here.

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