If you didn't know better, you’d be forgiven for thinking playwright and Brookfield native Ayad Akhtar moonlights as an economist. From The Invisible Hand, which touches on how terrorism and the futures markets overlap, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Disgraced, whose lead character works as a high-powered mergers and acquisitions broker, Akhtar is constantly digging into the ways money shapes our culture.
"What I wanted to do is tell the story of how we became a nation that was beholden only to economic value. We have eradicated almost every other metric for our collective well being other than dollars."
His latest work is no different. Junk is set in the junk bond era of the 1980s, which is familiar if you lived through it or if you’ve seen the Michael Douglas film, Wall Street. At the play's heart is the idea that debt holds value — that you can indeed make something out of nothing.
For Akhtar, theater offers a mirror with which to clearly see who we are. Sometimes it even shows us who we might aspire to become, but he says don't expect that in this play.
"It's bleak but it's realistic, unfortunately. If you're coming to the play and you're expecting something uplifting, just be prepared," notes Akhtar.
Junk officially opens on Friday at the Milwaukee Rep after runs in California, Europe, and on Broadway. Akhtar came by the Lake Effect studio to talk about the two visions of capitalism depicted in the play, how the system that we've built monetizes everything:
