Greed, debt and a revival of themes from 1980s
More viewpoint
When my colleague Michael Detroit first asked me to consider directing Ayad Akhtar’s new play, “Junk,” I was grateful for the opportunity to work with Playhouse on the Square, and of course I was excited to tackle a new play recently nominated for a Tony Award.
I also was a bit doubtful about the relevance of the play’s subject matter. Why would anyone be interested in seeing a play about the junk bond market of the mid-1980’s? Wasn’t that ancient history?
Since then we’ve lived through and survived the dot-com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis, and our economy seems to be going great guns at the moment.
Then I read the play. Midway through the first act, a character has this exchange with a journalist:
Merkin: Why does anybody borrow money? To do something, to build something, to start something new. Debt signifies new beginnings.
If we stopped being so ashamed of it – do you have any idea the kind of energy that would release? It’s the financial equivalent of splitting the atom. Practiwe cally speaking, we’re talking the Dow Jones at fifteen, twenty thousand.
Chen: Yesterday’s close was 1,300. The Dow at 20,000 sounds absurd.
Merkin: When this nation really understands how to harness the power of debt, the Dow at 20,000 isn’t absurd at all. It’s a logical consequence. Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Index sitting at over 25,000.
“Junk” doesn’t just show us a history lesson about greedy Wall Street types eager to create something out of nothing. “Junk” digs deep into our collective American psyche and reveals that the impulses of 30-plus years ago burn as hot today and are still as fraught with great risk and potential as they were then.
Call it greed. Call it Capitalism run amok. But those clichés skim the surface of a stew simmering with ingredients as fresh as today’s headlines: Out of control debt, insider trading, takeover targets, prisons for profit, sexual harassment, racism.
Those hot-button topics bubble up to the surface in the caldron of “Junk”. The anti-hero preaches using debt as an asset to create wealth that will equalize all the uneven playing fields continue to compete on regardless of our backgrounds or the bad hands we’ve been dealt.
The old guard of financial gatekeepers push back against these new interlopers, hoping to preserve a world of privilege they’d just as soon not share.
Regardless of who you see as the villain, the battles they engaged in forever altered the landscape they were fought upon.
Looking back, those battles of the mid-1980’s ushered in financial schemes that continue to create wealth at a blistering pace, occasionally upset by a market correction or two. And they haven’t yet created any true level playing fields.
Since we’ve started rehearsals on “Junk” we’ve seen news that Netflix will be financing its next slate of original content by issuing $1.9 billion in junk bonds, that Apple has a market cap of $1 trillion, with Amazon not too far behind, and that a member of Congress has been arrested for insider trading.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is indeed over 25,000. Ancient history? Perhaps it might be more accurate to describe the play as right on the money.
For more commentary, go to commercialappeal.com/opinion/
Warner Crocker is guest artist director of “Junk,” a play by Ayad Akhtar that runs through Sept. 9 at The Circuit Playhouse.