The Invisible Hand: (Modern Plays)

Nominated for the 2022 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre You see we are prisoners of a corrupt country that is our own making. But don't pretend you don't participate. You do. Of course you do. American banker Nick Bright knows that his freedom comes at a price. Confined to a cell in rural Pakistan, every second counts. Who will decide his fate? His captors, or the whims of the market? Ayad Akhtar is a Pulitzer Prize-winner, two-time Tony Award-nominee and winner of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This newly revised edition of The Invisible Hand is published to coincide with the first major revival at London's Kiln Theatre in July 2021.

About the Author :
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ayad is the author of Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown & Co.), which The Washington Post called “a tour de force” and The New York Times selected as a Top 10 Book of 2020, calling it “pitch-perfect…virtuosic.” Ayad is adapting Homeland Elegies into a limited series at FX, with director Oren Moverman and staring Kumail Nanjiani. His first novel, American Dervish (Little, Brown & Co.), was published in over 20 languages. As a playwright, he has written Junk (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Kennedy Prize for American Drama, Tony nomination); Disgraced (Lincoln Center, Broadway; Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tony nomination); The Who & The What (Lincoln Center); and The Invisible Hand (NYTW; Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award, Olivier, and Evening Standard nominations). Among other honors, Akhtar is the recipient of the Steinberg Playwrighting Award, the Nestroy Award, the Erwin Piscator Award, as well as fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, MacDowell, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo, where he serves as a Board Director. Additionally, Ayad is a Board Trustee at New York Theatre Workshop and PEN America, where he serves as President.

Review :
Mr. Akhtar's play . . . makes a forceful point about the seemingly ineradicable terrorism roiling the Middle East. Inspired though it may be by religious ideology, it is necessarily fueled, like most other movements that drive cultural change, by the brute power of money Somebody give this playwright a Pulitzer. Oh, right - Ayad Akhtar already has one, for a previous play, Disgraced . . . Although this new play continues the scribe's interest in the clashing ideologies of Americans and Muslims, The Invisible Hand is far more politically provocative The Invisible Hand has layers of delicious irony