Taut drama of American held hostage by extremists

Consider Theatre Exile's production of Ayad Akhtar's

The Invisible Hand

alongside the current season of the podcast

Serial

.

Both examine the conflicting narratives surrounding Americans held hostage by Muslim extremists in Pakistan. Serial focuses on real-life Bowe Bergdahl, a cog in the U.S. military machine who despised his superiors and their exploitation of Pakistani corruption and chaos, while Akhtar's fictive Nick Bright (played by Ian Merrill Peakes) is a Citibank employee, a cog in the U.S. financial machine who despises his superior, and whose company exploits weaknesses in the Pakistani economy.

Nick's captors tell him he must raise the money ($10 million) to buy his own freedom. Or else.

Nick's captors, in order of their position in the group's hierarchy, are Imam Saleem (J. Paul Nicholas), their philanthropy-and-terrorism-minded ringleader; Bashir (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh), a bulldog of a Londoner who left drink and women behind when he joined the cause; and Dar (Anthony Mustafa Adair), another cog, gentle, fearful, and poorly matched to his job as jailer.

The play's title refers not to the deity to which Saleem's group pledges allegiance, but rather to Adam Smith's theory of economic self-correction. As Nick explains to his fund-raising assistant and eventual protégée Bashir, it's "the confluence and conflict of everyone's self-interest." Indeed.

Akhtar never allows his story to settle into a predictable rhythm, and as in Serial, we don't know where our sympathies should lie - except here, we're inside the cement-walled hideout (set by Colin McIlvaine).

Is Nick our natural proxy? Is it Bashir, hungry for knowledge, and irresistibly charming once he lets down his iron guard? Or is it the others, caught in an impossible situation and trying to survive?

Director Matt Pfeiffer and sound designer Michael Kiley keep the action so taut that the audience startles with every percussive scene-change blackout. It's an excellent cast, but Ebrahimzadeh gets Bashir just right, from his tight shoulders and flitting eyes to the way the tension in the room relaxes when he does.

Akhtar won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, about a discursive Manhattan dinner party, but I like this drama better. It's one thing to argue politics on the Upper East Side; it's quite another to test those theories in the Middle East, at war, when the outcome is life or death. Sure, its setting is far away, but its implications and its warnings - particularly in this contentious political season - hit very close to home.

Through June 5 at Theatre Exile, 1340 S. 13th St. Tickets: $10-$40. Information: 215-218-4022 or TheatreExile.org.