‘The Invisible Hand’ at the Milwaukee Rep

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Photo by Kelsey Lawler

With its production of The Invisible Hand, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater begins a four-year relationship with leading American playwright Ayad Akhtar. Only Shakespeare had more productions in the United States last season than Akhtar, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Disgraced was the most produced play in the nation’s professional nonprofit theater universe.

Disgraced articulates the developing rage of a New York lawyer whose Muslim upbringing produces misguided expectations and assumptions in the minds of even those closest to him. Milwaukee Repertory Theater Artistic Director Mark Clements admired the play in a production at Lincoln Center in New York, prior to its London and Broadway runs and subsequent celebrity. When he attended a national conference of nonprofit theaters in Dallas in 2013, at which Akhtar was a keynote speaker, he learned that the playwright had grown up in Brookfield. After the speech, Akhtar signed copies of American Dervish, his novel of growing up Muslim in the Milwaukee area. Clements approached him to buy the book. Akhtar read his nametag and hugged him.

“I was just excited to meet him,” says Akhtar, who lives in New York but regularly spends time with his parents in Elm Grove. “I’d been reading about him, about what he’d been doing at Milwaukee Rep. One thing led to the next, we had lunch, he was eager to get me involved and I was eager to be involved. It was thrilling, the possibility of being involved with a company in Milwaukee. I really want to be part of the community. I grew up here. It’s home.”

Says Clements, “We decided to do a four-year plan where we’d do one of his plays in each of the first three years and commission a fourth. This was at a time when he was turning down a lot of commissions but he agreed to do one for us in year four to build up the relationship.”

Akhtar’s parents, both doctors, came from Pakistan during the 1960s though a U.S. government program designed to help scientists from around the globe settle here. His father was part of an early training program for electro physiologists in Staten Island, where Akhtar was born in 1970. The family soon moved to Brown Deer and then Brookfield when his father was hired by the University of Wisconsin to start electrophysiology labs in Madison and Milwaukee. Akhtar attended Happy Hill Elementary School, Golda Meir School, Dixon Elementary School and Brookfield Central High School, then left for Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he fell in love with theater. “Sometimes I didn’t go to class because I was too busy producing, directing or acting in plays,” he says. “I’ve wanted to write since I was 15 but I didn’t have anything to write yet. I was writing in a private way. It wasn’t until three or four years out of college that I said, OK, I’m going to do this.”

About his current success, he says, “I find myself perplexed by it. I know, of course, it’s a very simple, practical thing. Disgraced checks off a lot of boxes for artistic directors: diversity, interracial casting, topicality; and if they’ve seen it on stage, they recognize that the audience is very alive during the play. I think it’s a kind of communal experience.” 

We’ll find out next season. The Rep announced on Monday that Disgraced will be produced here in partnership with Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater and the McCarter Theatre of Princeton, N.J. Meanwhile, Akhtar’s The Invisible Hand is a pitch black comedy in which an American financier, taken hostage by a Pakistani warlord, teaches his captors to manipulate the stock market to reap huge profits from the death and destruction they’ll ultimately produce.

“As U.S. history shows, capitalism is the creation of inventory and the depletion of inventory through warfare,” Akhtar says. “The portrait of Pakistan in the play is not dissimilar from the disintegrated nation of Afghanistan across the border, a kind of free for all where the government is very limited in its capacity to control the country and individuals are in charge of swaths of the population. The financial machinations in the play are all logistically possible. So it’s imaginable.”

“His plays are a great exploration of the grays in life,” Clements says. “His protagonists are always complex and I think people appreciate that. His plays don’t seek to solve any issues but he’s not tentative or shy about going to complex places. Being Muslim, writing about things that pertain to the Muslim community and getting pushback from that community, he’s very mindful of what he does. The Invisible Hand is one of his most accessible plays. It’s a thriller with something meaty to say about terrorism and the finance system. It’s a great way to introduce his work.”

The Invisible Hand runs Feb. 24-April 3 in the Rep’s Stiemke Studio, 108 E. Wells St. Call 414-224-9490 or visit milwaukeerep.com for information on tickets, talk-backs and related events.