Ayad Akhtar delivers boring play of ideas with ‘The Invisible Hand’

"The Invisible Hand" gives us guns, terrorism, violence, hostages — even a daring escape attempt with nail clippers.

But don't worry, there's nothing here to send your blood pressure soaring. Playwright Ayad Akhtar is less interested in creating compelling characters than Etch a Sketch mouthpieces that spout off talking points.

The issues here are pretty much the same as they are in "Disgraced," Akhtar's Pulitzer-winning Broadway play: the relations between Islam and the Western world, as played out by troubled, highly ambivalent people.

The hostage is Nick Bright (Justin Kirk, late of "Weeds"), an American banker whose Pakistani captors, led by Imam Saleem (Dariush Kashani), demand a $10 million ransom.

Nick's main handler is the 20-something British-born Bashir. Unlike Kirk's resilient, dignified Nick, Usman Ally plays Bashir like a cartoon villain with a perpetual scowl on his face, eyes popping out of his head in righteous indignation.

To save his skin, Nick tells Bashir he can raise the ransom money by speculating on stocks and currencies. So they get a laptop and go to work, making millions in a few months.

This creates a rift between Bashir and the Imam, who argues that money isn't an end in itself. Drunk on trading, the younger man resorts to violence to further his speculations.

The show's title refers to the self-interest that helps regulate the free market. In this case, various self-interests are at odds with each other, but also with beliefs. The Imam uses some of the loot for mysterious purposes; Bashir forgets about Islam's tenets about money when his accounts balloon.

This is all well and good on an abstract level. But the show, directed by Ken Rus Schmoll, never breaks a sweat.
Having painted himself into a corner, Akhtar then gives us an ending that's a textbook definition of "anticlimactic." Whatever he's selling, we're not buying.

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