Last year, the Milwaukee Rep announced a singular partnership with playwright Ayad Akhtar, a Milwaukee native who’d since made it big both on stage and in other written media. The four-year collaboration will see the Rep producing three of Akhtar’s plays, including his Pulitzer Prize-winner Disgraced, followed by a world premiere commission in the final year.
If the first of these plays, The Invisible Hand, is any indication, it’s going to be a great four years for Rep patrons. Akhtar’s thriller about an American banker kidnapped by militants in Pakistan is a gripping work in and of itself, but its true success comes from the way it challenges the assumed benevolence of capitalism using the language of the marketplace itself.
Technically, no economics primer is necessary before walking into this production — Akhtar places just the right amount of exposition in the mouth of captured American Nick Bright (Tom Coiner) to get even the most financially illiterate viewer through the show.
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