by Ayad Akhtar
AM: Did your parents take you to the mosque?
AA: Sometimes. I had to pester my dad. He would take me every now and then but I really had to pester him to do it. It was kind of an inconvenience and didn’t happen very often, so it ended up being a special thing. Sometimes my dad would go and sit with me, but he couldn’t tolerate any of the stuff that was being said. I remember he and I would get into arguments and I would say, “Why aren’t you a good Muslim?” and “Why don’t you listen?” And he, to this day, has never let me live that down. He’s like, “You know, you were so preoccupied by that stuff. You know what you used to make me do at the mosque?” I say, “Dad, Dad, I know, you told me a bazillion times already. Please, forgive me.”
AM: Well, there’s something very theatrical about a mosque, or a church, you know?
AA: Absolutely. And, you know, I really think that my attention to the living word, spoken in public—which, to me, is what theater is—began there. With my rapt attention to what was being said at the mosque. There’s a pageantry, a theatricality to it, and, interestingly enough, in Muslim tradition there’s a kind of soberness to all of that, too. Which I think informs my aesthetic. You’re really the first person to even bring this up. I think that there is some very deep source of my own sense of theatricality that goes back to my experiences as a young boy in the mosque.
AM: Did you find with your friends as a young person that this somehow separated you, or did you feel as though there was a place you could put your faith, and then there was your other life? How did you incorporate the two?
AA: My experience was that it brought me closer to others. And that’s because I understood what kids were doing when they were going away on retreats with the Catholic church or Lutheran church or when kids were talking about Sunday school. It was a shared universe. In Islam and Christianity there are a lot of figures that overlap. But there was something about the devotional mind-set of religion being important. That was innate to me. A kind of love that shows up in American Dervish, that very pure love of whatever the mystery is that the divine stands in for—that has always been first and foremost with me.
AM: You’ve referred to yourself as a cultural Muslim—is that what you mean?
AA: Well, no. What I mean when I say that is… You know, a lot of Muslims and non-Muslims wonder, “Well, so, do you pray five times a day? Do you do the fast thing? Do you do this? Do you do that?” and whatever, and at the end of the day, my answer to those questions is no. My childhood faith, my literalist belief in the childhood version of my faith, died in my late adolescence. And with that died any pretension of Islam’s exclusivity on the truth. It came to feel increasingly absurd to me that who you were born to and what part of the planet you were born on somehow determined the likelihood of your so-called salvation. It just seemed patently absurd. I went through that traditional awakening from the slumber of childhood faith, if you will, that so many thinking individuals go through. And I was a militant agnostic for some years in college. And then, on the other side of that, my essential devotional nature reemerged. But this time it emerged in a nondenominational form. The practice of particular rites and rituals was not meaningful to me because it was not about my experience; it was really more about the performance of those things.
AM: It sounds as though you are still a deeply religious person.
AA: I do consider myself a very religious person, actually, but I have my own relationship to it. It’s not about the Prophet, or what language you speak when you speak to the Lord, or whatever. And that’s why I call myself a cultural Muslim in the sense that I’m not disavowing my Islamic origins; I’m not disavowing the way in which it has been an important foundation for my life. I consider myself to be part of the community.
AM: What drew you to the theater and then to writing for the theater? When did that shift begin to happen?
AA: Up until high school there’d always been an assumption that I would just become a doctor. You know, both my parents are doctors. But I had a teacher when I was fifteen who really changed my life when she exposed me to literature and made me read all kinds of stuff. She was the first person who ever got me reading plays. She made me read Beckett and Ionesco and Dürrenmatt and Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre. I spent two years reading everything on her shelf. I went to the Milwaukee Rep and saw some great shows. Something about it felt natural. In retrospect, I feel like I’ve always been sensitive to experiences that lend themselves to dramatic form.
AM: And then you really dove into the theater in college?
AA: In college, I started acting. I had a friend who was a director and he made me audition for a play, and it turned out I had a knack for it. I got really interested in Jerzy Grotowski and Andre Gregory after seeing My Dinner with Andre. Then I found myself, crazily enough, working with Grotowski for a year right out of college. Then I came back to New York and started working with Andre Gregory! I was just very fortunate to meet these very, very central, pivotal people along the path. My path into theater, oddly, has been very blessed, even though it hasn’t been public for most of my life. I’ve been around theater since just after high school. I taught acting for ten years in New York, worked with a lot of wonderful actors, and continued to teach acting in Europe. And though I was writing novels and writing screenplays, I always knew I would write a play someday. I was gathering kindling and the igniting spark hadn’t come along yet. And then it did, and I was in my very late thirties at that point.
AM: And the spark really ignited.
AA: Yes. I wrote drafts of four plays back-to-back in somewhere between eight and ten months. The Invisible Hand was the second one. Disgraced was the first.
AM: And then The Who & The What?
AA: Then The Who & The What. And then a fourth play which I don’t really show anybody, or I haven’t shown anybody yet, so.
AM: [laughs] Eight months! And this enormous creative outpouring.
AA: Yeah. They’d been gathering in me for a long time, I think.
AM: Do you see these plays as a kind of a progression?
AA: Yeah, absolutely. You can actually see American Dervish, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand all as movements, parts of the same gesture. And I have three more works that come from this vein of inspiration. So when I finally get through them it’ll be seven pieces.
AM: That’s an extraordinarily ambitious output, and a sort of August Wilson–like trajectory of interconnected stories.
AA: I think it’s going to be three books, three plays, and a film. But that will be the body of work that sort of tries to give voice to this question of Western identity and Muslim identity for people who are living here.
AM: Let’s talk about The Invisible Hand a little more. This play is certainly your most overtly political. I read somewhere that you wrote a novel—or you were writing one for about seven years—about a poet working at Goldman Sachs.
AA: [laughs] Yes. Yes.
AM: It would seem that you’ve had a longtime fascination with Wall Street and the effects of the market.
AA: Absolutely. As somebody who wishes to sort of understand the world better, I think that, in our day and age, not to understand how deeply finance has informed and defined our relationships—not only to each other but to ourselves—is to miss an important part of what it means to be alive right now, in this civilization. So that’s been a long-standing preoccupation for me. I have various zones of obsession and interest: Psychoanalysis has long been one of them, religious traditions have been another, finance has been another. And all of these are just modalities of trying to understand what it means to be human at this particular moment in our evolution or being as a civilization. So, to me, the play emerges, along with one of the two novels that I am in the process of writing, as a part of this larger inspiration. The novel is set in the financial world and deals with the second-generation Pakistani-Muslim immigrant community. Somebody who grows up to make a tremendous amount of money in the world of finance
and lives out the paradigm of the self-made man. But it turns out he was cheating to get ahead, which is what finance has become. That’s an important issue. Power, money, cheating. American obsessions. You go back to Tocqueville and see that that’s at the heart of whatever our national identity really is. And so being interested in that is just, I think, de rigueur for somebody who’s interested in understanding America.
AM: Well, in this play you give, in a wonderfully compelling, active fashion, a real lesson in how the market works. I think that a lot of people do not understand the market in this country. I read an article a little while ago about high-speed trading. I had no idea that that was happening. And I think the first time I heard about “futures,” I thought, What the heck is that? It’s all smoke and mirrors, you know?
AA: Yeah. It’s true. And I think that I’m an artist who definitely takes very seriously that dictum in Horace’s “Ars Poetica” that the purpose of art is to delight as well as to instruct. And I think that is the deepest pleasure our audiences experience. You see this now with cable TV, where you have these long-form series that are often set in these interesting worlds, and part of the pleasure of the series is seeing and understanding and learning about a whole swath of American activity. Whether it’s Mad Men or The Wire or whatever it may be, it’s this articulation of the structure of the world, which isn’t about anything didactic. It’s about opening horizons of consciousness for the audience, which is what art is ultimately supposed to do. And I think it scares a lot of writers to do that, because there’s a prevailing prejudice against being perceived as somehow didactic. But if you can do it in a delightful way, it leads to some very, very, profoundly satisfying theatrical experiences.
AM: Who do you write for? Who’s your audience?
AA: When an audience begins to sense that they’re being told a story, there is a kind of a waking up that happens, a very simple kind of “Oh, what’s gonna happen next?” feeling. And that feeling is very similar to the feeling that I think children have when they’re hearing a story. It’s very clear when a child gets bored or has lost confidence that what happens next is going to be interesting or plausible. There’s a sacred trust built on a narrative bond between the audience and the writer and the artist. It’s something I can track in myself by seeing if I am paying attention. And so, in a way, I’m writing with an almost childlike openness in myself to the question of, “Do I care what happens next?” That simple attention, that sense of being interested at every moment. It’s what I believe I share with everyone in the audience. We all have it. Strange as it may sound, that’s what I would call my audience.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The realization of a play in its final script and stage embodiments is the work of so many. First and foremost, the directors with whom I worked so closely: Seth Gordon, Ken Rus Schmoll, and Allen Nause. The inimitable Jim Nicola provided the lightning spark of inspiration—and unending support—that helped the play find its fullest and final form. Judy Clain, Terry Adams, Nicole Dewey, and the whole gang at Little, Brown made this edition possible. And of course none of it would have happened in the first place without my extraordinary team: Marc Glick, Chris Till, and Donna Bagdasarian.
I have benefited from the insights and talents of so many actors over the course of the writing of this play: Bhavesh Patel, John Hickok, Ahmed Hassan, Michael James Reed, Michael Schantz, Babak Tafti, Michael Esper, Ajay Naidu, Amir Arison, Debargo Sanyal, Reed Birney, Arian Moayed, Larry Grimm, Behzad Dabu, Reg Rogers, Rufus Collins, Nick Choksi, Dan Weschler, Ryan Melia, Arya Shah, Alex Gurary Falberg, Demosthenes Chrysan, Connor Toms, Erwin Galan, Elijah Alexander, William Ontiveros, Usman Ally, Justin Kirk, Jameal Ali, Dariush Kashani.
There are so many whose support and guidance were instrumental at every stage of development: Steve Klein, Shane Le Prevost, Dasha Epstein, Linda Chapman, Don Shaw, Kurt Beattie, Shazad Akhtar, Madani Younis, Amanda Watkins, Johanna Pfaelzer, Len Berkman, Kimberly Senior, Dan Hancock, Elise Joffe, Stuart Rosenthal, Mark Clements, Lucie Tiberghien, Nicole Galland, Oren Moverman, Michael Pollard, Andre Bishop, Paige Evans, Jack Doulin, David Van Asselt, Vinay Tolia, James Lapine, J. T. Rogers.
Finally, the wonderful and supportive staffs at the three theaters where this play was birthed: the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, ACT Theatre in Seattle, and New York Theatre Workshop.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ayad Akhtar is a screenwriter, playwright, actor, and novelist. He is the author of a novel, American Dervish, and was nominated for a 2006 Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay for the film The War Within. His plays include Disgraced, produced at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater in 2012 and on Broadway in 2014 and recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and The Who & The What, also produced at Lincoln Center Theater, in 2014. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY AYAD AKHTAR
The Who & The What
Disgraced
American Dervish
Praise for
The Invisible Hand
“With The Invisible Hand, Ayad Akhtar solidifies the reputation he forged with Disgraced as a first-rate writer of fierce, well-crafted dramas that employ topicality but are not limited by it.… The prime theme is pulsing and alive: when human lives become just one more commodity to be traded, blood eventually flows in the streets.”
—Brendan Lemon, Financial Times
“Raises probing questions about the roots of the Islamic terrorism that has rattled the world for the last decade and more.”
—Charles Isherwood, New York Times
“A hand-wringing, throat-clenching thriller… that grabs you and won’t let go.”
—Jesse Green, New York
“Confirms the Pakistani-American playwright as one of the theater’s most original, exciting new voices.… In this tight, plot-driven thriller, Akhtar again turns hypersensitive subjects into thought-provoking and thoughtful drama. But here he also brings a grasp of money—big money—not to mention the market’s unsettling connections to international politics.”
—Linda Winer, Newsday
“Politically provocative.… A scary (and dreadfully funny) treatise on the universality of human greed.”
—Marilyn Stasio, Variety
“A tragically contemporary thriller.… There has been precious little activity on this front since Jerry Sterner’s Other People’s Money and Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money.… Mr. Akhtar makes up for this oversight with a vengeance.”
—Harry Haun, New York Observer
“A tense, provocative thriller about the unholy nexus of international terrorism and big bucks.… Akhtar… expertly decodes that vivid expression, ‘blood money.’… The Invisible Hand jolts along like a well-made caper flick.… But the taut plot is also a great setup for a fierce psychological match, and a useful colloquy on the American dollar as a force for good and evil.… A very telling, compelling play.”
—Misha Berson, Seattle Times
“Whip-smart and twisty.… Akhtar offers a hostage tale that balances violence, humor and geopolitical critique, never losing its edge or letting us complacently root for one side.”
—David Cote, Time Out New York
“What’s the difference between a banker and a terrorist? Akhtar’s new play attempts to fathom this once unfathomable question as it sounds the depths of global events, relating market ‘corrections’ to the logic of jihad. But The Invisible Hand chews on other, equally compelling questions, too: What and whose interests ultimately shape our political and moral values? Under what circumstances will we stay true to convictions—and what does it take to corrupt them?… Akhtar’s musings come in the form of a suspenseful drama that could easily be a television film.… The Invisible Hand offers genuine insight into the future of the West, and it’s a brutal one to contemplate.”
—Tom Sellar, Village Voice
“The Invisible Hand has layers of delicious irony.”
—Amitava Kumar, The Guardian
Praise for
“Disarmingly funny. A fiery… probing new play, crackling with ideas.”
—Charles Isherwood, New York Times
“At its fiercest, The Who & The What bares some of the same teeth as Akhtar’s riveting 2013 Pulitzer-copping Disgraced.… Akhtar’s who and what are potent.”
—Bob Verini, Variety
“Vibrant. Strong and colorful. A culture-clash drama simmering with humor.”
—Associated Press
“A heady exploration of how one’s hoped-for path in life can crash against the ramparts of family and society.… The Who & The What helps lift a veil on a spiritual tradition that’s little-portrayed on American stages. The ‘what’ of this ambitious play could just about fill a book by itself; the ‘who’ at its heart is one lively, vibrant and questioning voice.”
—James Hebert, San Diego Union-Tribune
“Fearless… powerful… Ayad Akhtar is… prodigiously talented.”
—Jeremy Gerard, Deadline
“Continually absorbing.… Akhtar has a splendid command of structure, and… a fine ear for dialogue.”
—The New Yorker
“Akhtar is a provocative, wise, and funny playwright.”
—Steven Suskin, Huffington Post
“Crackles with intelligence and behavioral truth.… Akhtar is so eminently gifted in writing scenes that quake with powerful emotion.”