A Hostage Bets on the Market for Survival
Charles IsherwoodDecember 8, 2014: The beheadings of journalists and aid workers that have become a grisly aspect of the tumult in the Middle East hover like ugly ghosts behind The Invisible Hand, the latest play by Ayad Akhtar, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced can currently be seen on Broadway. Like that sizzling drama, Mr. Akhtar’s shrewd play, which opened on Monday night at New York Theater Workshop, raises probing questions about the roots of the Islamic terrorism that has rattled the world for the last decade and more. The victim under threat here, Nick Bright, played by Justin Kirk, is neither a journalist nor a worker for a charitable organization. He’s a high-level American employee of Citibank in Pakistan, being held by militants. Mr. Akhtar’s intelligent if talky drama is less a suspenseful tale of Nick’s endangerment than an investigation of the manipulation of global financial markets — by good guys or bad guys — and the power of the almighty dollar to shape or shake societies around the world. Nick has already been socked away in a nondescript cell as the play opens, kept handcuffed and under supervision. It’s fairly benign supervision, at first. Dar (Jameal Ali), one of his lower-level captors, is seen clipping Nick’s fingernails while they discuss the profitable financial advice Nick had given him: to stockpile potatoes, wait until the price climbs, then sell at a great profit. Oh, and don’t forget to transfer the takings from the unreliable Pakistani rupee into the dollar. This doesn’t sit well with Nick’s more brutal captor, Bashir (Usman Ally), who accuses him of corrupting Dar with his advice. He threatens that if Citibank doesn’t pay the $10 million ransom they are asking for Nick’s release, he will hand Nick over to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi — the violent Islamic terrorist organization centered in Pakistan that was involved in the infamous killing of the journalist Daniel Pearl.
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