JUNK, the Play

Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Disgraced, has now returned to Broadway with his play JUNK.

He had long wanted to write “a very big play about finance” he confesses.  He is not going to be solely defined as an ethnic playwright. Having been a decoder of a strain of Muslim-American life — middle-class, educated, assimilated, though less comfortably so after 2001 — he has, for now, moved on.

His interest in finance is longstanding. When Akhtar set off for New York to become a writer, his Muslim-American father who founded a cardiology practice in Wisconsin, made him promise to read The Wall Street Journal, every day. He helped support himself by trading stocks, using as seed money annual stipends of $12,000 or so sent by his parents.

JUNK is set in the 1980s, in the high-flying, risk-seeking, teetering financial world and inspired by the real junk bond kings of the day. This fictionalized, riveting story shows us from the inside how money became the only thing that mattered.

“The play strives, frankly, to implicate us ALL: the culture that seems driven by money, “the financialization of everything.”  “It’s about the forces that are secretly or not-so-secretly running our lives:  it’s the “financialization” of everything! …the fact that it’s happened so quickly…it’s happened in my lifetime.  I think the country has undergone a sea change…about what constitutes wealth” bemoans Tony winning director Doug Hughes (Doubt).

Although his drama is set a quarter-century ago, JUNK speaks to the present day. Mr. Akhtar believes that all the sound and fury and political chaos of the Trump-era America covers for even greater shifts of money and power to the upper classes — and that we are looking in the wrong direction and have been for quite some time. “The new landed gentry are those who manufacture money, who have access to massive amounts of capital,” says Akhtar. “That’s the strand the play is really following.”

Identity politics on both sides, he believes, has the nation “consumed and distracted from the real story.”  “Money,” he says, “is what’s happening.”

In the play, financier Robert Merkin (played by Steven Pasquale as a Michael Milken-like junk bond king), the resident genius of the upstart firm Sackler Lowell, has just landed on the cover of Time Magazine.  Hailed as “America’s Alchemist,” his proclamation that debt is an asset has propelled him to dizzying heights.  Zealously promoting his belief in the near-sacred infallibility of markets, he is trying to re-shape the world. He will stop at nothing to take over an iconic American manufacturing company, changing the rules as he goes. With his brilliance matched only by his swagger, Merkin sets in motion nothing less than a financial civil war, pitting magnates against workers, lawyers against journalists, and everyone against themselves.

Steven Pasquale (The Bridges of Madison County and TV’s Rescue Me) leads an impeccable cast, in this portrait of the dark side of the American Dream.

“It is not a judgment or an indictment about how we do things on Wall Street, but it is an examination of where we are as a country in terms of how we live economically, and it asks the audience to really think about it” explains Steven Pasquale.  He plays the lead among a cast of 23 actors: Ito Aghayere, Philip James Brannon, Tony Carlin, Demosthenes Chrysan, Jenelle Chu, Caroline Hewitt, Rick Holmes, Tec Koch, Ian Lasiter, Teresa Avia Lim, Adam Ludwig, Sean McIntyre, Nate Miller, Steven Pasquale, Ethan Phillips, Matthew Rauche, Matthew Saldivar, Charlie Semine, Michael Silberry, Miriam Silverman, Joey Slotnick, Henry Stram, and Stephanie Umoh.

JUNK has sets by John Lee Beatty, costumes by Catherine Zuber, lighting by Ben Stanton, and original music and sound by Mark Bennett.

Junk had its world premiere season production at La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, CA in 2016,

 For tickets or more information, call Telecharge at 212 239 6200, visit lct.org org or the box office at The Vivian Beaumont Theater, 150 West 65th Street, New York.

    Twelfth Night, or What You Will?

    A Shakespeare Comedy

Classic Stage Company (CSC) is celebrating its 50th Anniversary season.  CSC is committed to re-imagining classic stories for contemporary audiences.

Classic Stage Company, as part of its 50th anniversary season, presents Fiasco Theater’s Twelfth Night, Or What You Will by William Shakespeare.  “Twelfth Night is a fitting companion piece to As You Like It (that initiated the season earlier in Fall 2017),” both among Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, “in Act I of (the) 50th anniversary season,” explains John Doyle, Artistic Director of Classic Stage Company.

Shipwrecked on the island of Illyria, Viola and her twin brother Sebastian are separated, each fearing the other lost to the sea.  Viola disguises herself as a boy and wades into a complex romantic triangle with Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia.  New York’s innovative Fiasco Theater brings their hallmark style and expansive imagination to one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies.

“One of the primary realms of interest in Twelfth Night relies equally on prose as well as verse,” say Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, directors of Fiasco’s production of Twelfth Night.  Being heavily influenced by the works of Cicely Berry and Andrew Wade, and having developed the tools of purpose, structure, and rhythm of prose since 2010, the directors were excited to put them to use in Twelfth Night.

“Fiasco was born out of the crucible of (their) shared graduate training at the Brown/Trinity MFA acting program,” they said.

In spite of presenting work by other playwrights, they have consistently returned to the work of Shakespeare mainly for the language, the stories, the wilderness, the boldness, the honesty, the surprise, the rhythms, the specificity, the depth, the silliness.

Shakespeare was uniquely capable of breathing the full richness of universal human experience into the language of his characters: love and hate; honor and sin; the mortal thoughts that drive us; humor and wit …are all realized.

Ben Steinfeld, serving as musical director for Fiasco’s Shakespeare productions considers it “a gift” “to help figure out how to serve the production, while simultaneously giving the ensemble a chance to explore their musical identities and indulging his own musical passions.”  The joy of making “music together, flows into the acting.”  “It’s important,” says Steinfeld, for him and the ensemble “that the actors make that music live on stage.”

Directed by Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, the cast of Twelfth Night, Or What You Will features Jessie Austrian (Olivia), Noah Brody (Orsino), Tina Chilip (Maria), Paul L. Coffey (Malvolio), Andy Grotelueschen (Sir Toby Belch), Javier Ignacio (Sebastian), David Samuel (Antonio), Ben Steinfeld (Feste), Paco Tolson (Sir Andrew Aguecheek) and Emily Young (Viola).  Scenic design is by John Doyle, costume design by Emily Rebholz and lighting design by Ben Stanton.

For tickets or more information, call (212) 352 3101 or (866) 811 4111, visit classicstage.org or the box office at 136 East 13th Street, New York.

(Mabel Pais is a freelance writer.  She writes on The Arts and Entertainment, Social Issues, Health and Wellness, and Spirituality)