JUNK Not at All

Charlene Baldridge
Photo by Ken Howard

JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt

Regarding JUNK: those expecting light entertainment should go see a musical.

JUNK Company
all JUNK images by Jim Carmody

Saturday night (August 6) playwright Ayad Akhtar stood in the Mandell Weiss Theatre lobby after the final act of his epic play, JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt, which is produced in its world premiere at La Jolla Playhouse through August 21. I wanted to tell him how much a burned-out friend loved the play, which he’d seen earlier in the week. My friend reported it had restored his faith in theatre after he’d seen too many bad plays of late.

The line to shake Akhtar’s hand* was just too long, so I came home, mentally fatigued after having endured the instructive moments in his play, which concerns guile, greed and the unrelenting drive to succeed no matter the cost, no matter the risk.  These qualities are possessed by movers and shakers of the 1980s-era. Events in the play surround a hostile takeover and are based on no one person or situation in particular, but are conglomerates. They give us insight into the kind of market machinations that led to current conditions, the depression of 2008, and attitudes towards Wall Street, as well as social, political and financial practices. The scary part is the question that hangs in the air at the play’s end: who among us can resist selling out if the money is right?

Armando Riesco, Josh Cooke and Matthew Rauch

The 17-person company, a few of whom (Tony Carlin, Jason Kravits, Hunter Spangler, and Sean McIntyre) play multiple parts, is superb. The playwright happily gives numerous midlife men a chance to shine on stage rather than in television cops and robbers series. 

Akhtar writes women exceptionally well, too, and his women here (Annika Boras, Zora Howard, Jennifer Ikeda, and Zakiya Iman Markland) have an opportunity to display their characters’ grit and brains.

Major characters on the takeover side are Robert Merkin (Josh Cooke), Israel Peterman (Matthew Rauch),  Raul Rivera (Armando Riesco), and Boris Pronsky (Jeff Marlowe), who target Thomas Everson’s (Linus Roache) Everson Steel, in the family for three generations. 

Josh Cook as Merkin

David Rasche as Tresler and Jennifer  Ikeda as Judy Chen

Among Everson’s allies are Jacqueline Bount (Markland) and Maximilien Cizik (Henry Stram). Both sides enlist the aid and funding of various others, a plethora of stunning characters that include the Everson ally, wealthy private equity manager Leo Tresler (David Rasche), whose seductive scenes with seemingly incorruptible investigative journalist Judy Chen (Ikeda) are among the play’s best, at least in this romantic’s eye. Others in the company, impeccably directed by Doug Hughes, are Benjamin Burdick and Keith Wallace.

To say the audience was rapt throughout might be putting it too strongly. Some left after Act I, others after Act II, and still others sat through both intervals and complained loudly to their companions.

There is no doubt that Akhtar’s play, possessing supreme and eerie resonance with current election rhetoric, is important and cautionary; however, there is a lot of it, and its intricacy is demanding to soak up. The closest thing to JUNK that I recall in my theatrical experience is Jerry Sterner’s 1989 Other People’s Money, produced at the Old Globe in the 1990-91 season. Also about a hostile takeover, that one had a great deal more humor and fewer characters, though I must say the manipulators in both plays are/were quite likeable. As someone remarked, they are just a bit more realistic than we Pollyannas.

Akhtar is recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for his play Disgraced, author of the book American Dervish and co-writer of the 2005 film, The War Within, and playwright of The Who and the What, premiered at the Playhouse in 2013.

John Lee Beatty’s set is a keeper.

JUNK: The Golden Age of Debt continues at 7:30pm Tuesdays-Wednesdays, 8pm Thursdays-Sundays, 7pm Sundays and 2pm Saturdays-Sundays through August 21. www.lajollaplayhouse.org or 858-550-1010

*Sunday night, I did have a chance to shake Akhtar’s hand. It was prior to the world premiere of Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower. Akhtar intends to keep working on JUNK throughout the run.