This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
05/24/2018 12:01 AMWhat’s it like to play an American banker who is kidnapped by a Pakistani militant organization, shackled in a concrete hideout for months, and whose future is anyone’s guess—ransom? Torture? Beheading? Escape?
Well, it’s pretty intense, says Eric Bryant, who plays that captive high-level employee of Citibank who specializes in the Pakistani futures market as depicted in The Invisible Hand, a play by Ayad Akhtar that is playing at Hartford’s TheaterWorks through Saturday, June 23.
To play that character again, says the New York-based actor, is a return trip into the heart of darkness.
Bryant first played the role of Nick Bright, the stressed-out—but also clever—high-tech banker when Westport Country Playhouse produced the show two years ago. That production received Connecticut Critics Circle awards for outstanding play, direction (for associate artistic director David Kennedy), and for Bryant as lead actor in a play.
Rob Ruggiero, producing artistic director of TheaterWorks, took the unusual step in deciding to remount a show that was not initially a co-production, the first time in memory that one Connecticut theater has revisited a show by another.
Akhtar received a Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, a domestic drama in which two upscale American couples deal with issues of race, religion, and assimilation—and which was presented several seasons back at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre. But in The Invisible Hand, the story is set in a bleak terrorist outpost in Pakistan and deals with manipulation of global financial markets, laundering schemes, and internal conflicts among the militants.
“This is going to be a brand new experience for me, revisiting a part after two years,” says Bryant. “I’ve never had to recreate a performance before. I expect many things will automatically be retained by sheer muscle memory while at the same time—and here’s the delicate zen balancing act—allowing for many things to organically evolve that might be different and to not only not resist that which may be different but to embrace these things, too.”
Bryant says he has learned lessons from the first production on how best to protect his own personal psyche.
“It is a taxing experience. One part of you acknowledges that, of course, this is a fictional circumstance. You’re an actor and you’re playing a character, but at the same time there are certain physiological responses that your body has,” he says. “When someone is in your face yelling at you at full volume, it’s still someone yelling in your face.”
Other details in the performance can also be unnerving.
“I remember the first time they slapped the cuffs on me. That’s a very particular sensation, having your hands handcuffed behind you in a chair and the sound that it makes and feeling how tight-fitting it was,” he says. “I’d be on the train going home to New York after rehearsal and just be completely exhausted and I’m thinking, ‘How can I be exhausted? I’ve been sitting in a chair for most of the day.’ But it was hour upon hour of acting in a literal life-and-death situation where you are in a heightened, adrenalized experience.”
Bryant knew he had to find ways to protect himself and one was to hold back somewhat during rehearsals.
“I realized I couldn’t ‘go there’ and to be so completely vulnerable every single time because I would be spent by the time we had an audience,” he says.
Bryant says he had a great relationship with the other actors who played his captors, though sometime he felt the need to “just be by myself. But I wasn’t doing any Daniel Day-Lewis method-y thing. It was more of a just taking a breather and disengaging for a bit.”
One thing that he says has changed since 2016 is world politics. During rehearsals in Westport, the cast would joke about the unlikelihood of Brexit and a Republican win.
“These things that were previously thought of as impossible were proven to be possible,” he says, which makes the work even more relevant today.
“The play exists on multiple levels. On one hand, it is a highly entertaining, suspenseful hostage thriller. But it also exists as a broader examination of fundamental belief systems—and how they operate in our lives even in the face of evidence that contradicts those beliefs. All of the characters in the play have a crisis in terms of their belief systems intersecting with a new reality they find themselves. It’s about how much we are invested in holding onto those belief systems.”