The Invisible Hand

Money trumps all in MTC’s fascinating Invisible Hand

Marin Theatre Company concludes its 49th season with a play that is timely for this election cycle to be sure, but because its focus is on the powerful religion known as money, it’s really timely all the time.

The Invisible Hand by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ayad Akhtar (Disgraced), is set in the Middle East, involves Muslim extremists and traffics in terrorism in the form of a potentially lucrative (and vengeful) kidnapping of American banker Nick Bright. But the most fascinating aspect of the drama is how incisively it cuts into what money (lots of it) does to human beings, whatever their cause or background. Akhtar takes a situation we think we know: an American employee of Citibank is kidnapped and held for $10 million ransom while he is working in Pakistan. The kidnappers, followers of a man named Imam Saleem, are attempting to bring some semblance of order back to their country after the U.S. has “raped and plundered” it and the government has failed its people utterly.

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Marin Theatre Co. hands down a winner with ‘Invisible Hand’

When characters in a play spend a whole scene hunched over a laptop, it usually spells death for drama. What could be less interesting than watching other people stare at screens — often one of the very things we attend theater in order to escape?

So it’s telling that in “The Invisible Hand,” now in its Bay Area premiere at Marin Theatre Company, the scenes in front of a computer are every bit as gripping as those at gunpoint.

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5 STARS “A tense thrill ride” 

MTC’s hostage drama ‘Invisible Hand’ is a tense thrill ride

Ayad Akhtar is all the rage right now. The New York-born, Milwaukee-bred playwright’s Pulitzer prize-winning debut drama “Disgraced,” which had its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in November, is the most-produced play at member theaters of the national organization Theatre Communications Group this season (not including Shakespeare and Christmas plays), according to American Theatre magazine. He’s also the most produced playwright among those 386 theaters nationwide this season (again, not including Shakespeare). Not bad for a guy with only three plays produced so far, all of which premiered in 2012. His fourth play, “Junk: The Golden Age of Debt” is set to debut at La Jolla Playhouse in July.

The way the relationships and balance of power continually shift keeps the audience on tenterhooks, especially because the threat of death is never far from the surface.

Marin Theatre Company’s Bay Area premiere of Akhtar’s drama “The Invisible Hand” gives a strong sense of what all the fuss is about. The play premiered at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis in 2012 and has played at several theaters since then (including off-Broadway), and the script was published in book form last year, but the playwright reportedly sent MTC three new scenes just two weeks before previews, so this could be said to be the U.S. premiere of this particular version of the play.

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WILD APPLAUSE “Gripping. MTC hands down a winner.” 

“Fascinating”