The Invisible Hand

FINANCE AND THE FIGURE OF NOW

When I first moved to New York in my early twenties, my father made a deal with me: "Read the Wall Street Journal every day and I'll pay your rent." He and my mother—both physicians, both concerned by my obsession with the arts and what they saw as an apparent, and complete, lack of interest in the more mundane matters of the world—had concocted the plan. They knew their son well enough to know that (1) I would abide if I agreed, and (2) I would probably become interested if I spent enough time reading it.

Such has been my introduction to so much of life, on the written page first. And so it was with the world of money.

My rent was $580, a sum split between myself and my then live-in girlfriend. I read the Journal at the local library a few blocks away, and sometimes at home. Back then the front-page left-hand column was usually the most interesting—and best written—story in the news. My folks were right. I got hooked. That monthly check started to seem entirely unearned.

It was the mid-nineties in New York City, the moment of the first tech boom fueled by the advent of the Internet. Tina Brown had taken over The New Yorker, and in its pages, profiles of the financial elites seemed to sit cheek by jowl with the accomplishments of the moment's most cultured. Soon, twentysomethings and thirtysomethings would be flush with millions (and later billions). At book parties and dinner parties and openings, money and its allure were all the talk. I couldn't have known then that a permanent shift was under way. Or let me put it like this: An old American obsession was finding new and vibrant life, finding a figure and form that would make money—its exigencies, its amorality, its language, its ethos—central not only to the larger cultural conversation but to our experience of the human.

Surely money has always mattered to us. As far back as his journey through the fledgling democracy that was the United States in the early 1800s, Alexis de Tocqueville was able to see and articulate this with characteristic pith and pungency:

Was it ungracious of him to put it thus, or just a blunter way to say a thing we already know about ourselves? Some form of this question has long been a preoccupation for me—humanly, artistically. I, too, share this fascination with money—with its uses, with those who have it, with what the great Wallace Stevens once called the "poetry" of finance. Perhaps it's a form of vicarious living, the only reasonable pathway for an artist to accede to fantasies of power denied to her in life. Or perhaps it is the recognition that our being-with-money—that is to say, our living with it, individually, collectively—speaks to so much that is at the root of art's ultimate pursuit: the most hidden, the most human, the most primal. Beyond the free-market jingoism and all the ceaseless invocations of "The Economy"—as if those two words referred to some newfangled deity whose wrath we were always trying to appease—beyond all this, isn't money the site par excellence of our recurring quotidian terrors and soaring fantasies, and, above all, the everyday test of our character? And in America, money is something else as well: the metonymic complement of personal will itself, its acquisition standing in for the supreme American expression of individual vitality. In many ways, money is our central story.

The American story is no longer ours alone. Globalization has made it, increasingly, everyone's story. The socio-philosophical reasons for this are too complex, too contentious to be addressed in any direct way. And so it falls, I believe, to the artist to offer a picture of the world we are creating, a picture rich with contradiction, short on resolution. This, in any event, was the motivation behind writing The Invisible Hand—that of giving form to an American tale, but one unfolding on a global stage, an encounter of our national mythos with the world beyond our borders. Nick on one side, Bashir on the other. Yet in the end, both men at the heart of this drama resisted any schematic treatment of their so-called allegorical roles. A hostage thriller became an enactment (and inversion) of the Pygmalion tale and changed course again, revealing, at its close, what seemed to me an unlikely but unmistakable portrait of ourselves.

Ayad Akhtar

New York City

April 2015

PRODUCTION HISTORY

The Invisible Hand had its world premiere as a one-act play on March 7, 2012, at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (Steven Woolf, artistic director). It was directed by Seth Gordon; the set design was by Scott Neale; the costume design was by Lou Bird; the lighting design was by Ann Wrightson; the sound design was by Rusty Wandall; and the stage manager was Champe Leary. The cast was as follows:

A considerably revised two-act version of The Invisible Hand had its West Coast premiere on September 5, 2014, at ACT—A Contemporary Theatre, Seattle, Washington (Kurt Beattie, artistic director). It was directed by Allen Nause; the set design was by Matthew Smucker; the costume design was by Rose Pederson; the lighting design was by Kristeen Willis Crosser; the sound design was by Brendan Patrick Hogan; and the stage manager was JR Welden. The cast was as follows:

The two-act version of The Invisible Hand had its New York premiere on November 19, 2014, at New York Theatre Workshop (Jim Nicola, artistic director). It was directed by Ken Rus Schmoll; the set design was by Riccardo Hernandez; the costume design was by ESOSA; the lighting design was by Tyler Micoleau; the sound design was by Leah Gelpe; and the stage manager was Megan Schwarz Dickert. The cast was as follows:

Characters

Place

Somewhere in Pakistan.

Time

In the very near future.

The play should be performed with an intermission between Acts One and Two.