Debt Is King for Steven Pasquale in Ayad Akhtar's Finance Epic Junk

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In a culture of sky-high credit card debt, Instagram feeds filled with name-brand hashtags and front page stories about “affluenza,” it’s no surprise that greed and consumption are running rampant. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar’s ambitious new work Junk offers an origin story for how modern finance has changed our attitudes toward wealth, worth and legacy.

“It's an attempt to tell the history of a shift in the American psyche around money that has led us to where we are today,” says Akhtar about the play. Directed by Doug Hughes and starring Steven Pasquale, Junk examines the testosterone-drenched decadence of Wall Street in the 1980s and the rise of debt as fuel for hostile takeovers.

Junk looks not just at high-yield (or junk) bond traders as a character study in rapacity and greed a la Gordon Gecko; it treats the recent history of modern finance as what Akhtar calls “the great untold story of our era.”

Akhtar tells his tale with a sweeping hand. “It’s a modern Shakespeare history war play that takes place in the financial community during the most risky and predatory time in the history of capitalism,” Pasquale says. “We don't have kings and queens in America. What we have are super successful Wall Street tycoons. ”

If the words “finance” and “Shakespeare” frighten you, put your worries aside. This is a fast-paced thriller with wide-reaching ramifications. “Money is an emotional subject matter,” Hughes says. “We've tried to heighten the aspects of finance that are about fear and dreams, rather than the mechanics of bond trading.”

In other words, you don’t have to know anything about corporate finance to appreciate Junk. “It moves incredibly quickly,” Pasquale says. “The information comes at you very fast, and it's smart.” As Akhtar points out, even Shakespeare himself “used history to speak to the present.”​



In Junk, Pasquale plays Robert Merkin, loosely based on Michael Milken, the junk bond king of the 1980s, who pioneered the use of debt securities to arm corporate raiders (and who eventually landed in jail). Merkin is a master manipulator, and Hughes says he needed someone with serious charisma at the center of the production: “What the role requires is somebody who's a seducer, a zealot and a kind of military leader. [He’s a] revolutionary who has a frightening level of confidence, and I think Steven is really capable of all that. He's qualified as a star for all the right reasons."

Although Junk is inspired by Milken, Ivan Boesky and other players of the go-go '80s, Akhtar warns against drawing straight lines between his characters and the real-life people who inspired them. “The truth is I used that history and shaped it to new ends,” Akhtar says. “I wanted the play to speak to our country today. I wasn't interested in simply looking back. I wanted to write a play about what finance has wrought in our world.”

“Junk,” Hughes adds, “is exhilarating exposure to the forces that, whether you know it or not, are running your life.”

"Junk" begins on October 5 and opens on November 2 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater

Photos: Emilio Madrid-Kuser | Hair Stylist & Makeup Artist: Angella Valentine | Styling: Heather Newberger | Styling Assistant: Noa Bricklin | Styling Intern: Taylor Freeman