Wall Street Raiders on The Rep's Stage

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A finalist for the Best Play Tony Award last season after a run at New York’s Lincoln Center and winner of the prestigious Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, Junk is Brookfield-native Ayad Akhtar’s fourth play. It’s also his fourth to be staged by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre (The Rep) during a unique four-year partnership that’s grown even greater since Akhtar has joined its associate artist family and board of directors. A stage adaptation by The Rep’s artistic director, Mark Clements, of Akhtar’s Brookfield-based novel, American Dervish, is now in the works.

Akhtar has continued to polish the script of Junk. Working with Clements, he’s just finished a new two-hour, intermission-free, updated revision that will premiere in Milwaukee Jan. 16-Feb. 17. That’s important, because Junk comes closer than any play I know to addressing our present troubled moment, its causes and its implications for the future.

The title refers to junk bonds. Akhtar’s fictional characters are based to varying degrees on actual Wall Street raiders, businessmen, lawyers, law enforcement agents and laborers from the 1980s, when massive debt became, for a few, a means of acquiring massive wealth. What follows is edited from a recent conversation with Akhtar about Junk.

Your new draft left me close to tears. It’s so frightening.

Yes. What’s happening to the country is frightening. The play is a kind of elegy to a lost battle. It tries to stage the battle again, so we can feel the poignancy of what has been lost and, in a way, the uselessness of the moral triumphs we’ve given ourselves in consolation for what we’ve lost. I think it’s not a coincidence that we have a man in [the White House] who calls himself the “king of debt.” To quote: “I am the king of debt. I love debt. Nobody loves debt better than me.” So, it’s all of a piece. The gap between perceived value and real value is the same gap that we now see between language and meaning, the same gap between appearance and reality that has engulfed our nation.

We are a people beholden to and completely infatuated with unreality. That comes from a kind of lack of collective confrontation with the gravitas of death and the endless franchise of limitless possibility represented by credit cards. We’re looking at corporate debt levels that are so extreme because of the years of easy money that the system has had, that all the smartest people I know think we’re headed for some really, really tough times. It’s the same story over and over. We don’t seem to learn any lessons. So, what are you going to do? Hopefully try to educate, entertain and enlighten people at the same time.

I feel the size of the matter, reading the play. At the same time, I don’t know how to measure the size of it. That’s why I said “frightening.”

I have a friend who used to be a trader and is now a private investor. He walked out of the play and said, “I finally got it. I got what has happened to America, and it filled me with such tremendous sadness.” Bill Moyers also had a thoughtful response, but it was about his despair. So, in rehearsal, when I mentioned these anecdotes, one of the actors said, “Why write it if you can’t change anything? It’s hard to see why we should do it.”

Because it’s real?

I think we have to have some awareness of what we’ve become. That’s a precondition for any possibility for there to be some counter to it. To know that the arc of history doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice. That it tends to bend toward the interests of the powerful, and they ultimately define what is right. And we have allowed the powerful so much power.

What’s happened to the conservative movement—which is actually not conservative at all, because they’re not trying to “conserve” something—is that they’ve become weird reactionary activists. They’re progressives of a different ilk. And, I think their fundamental ideology appears to be that individual franchise, supported by untold amounts of wealth, enables individuals to be free enough to define a social order.

So, it looks to me like people like the Kochs, and others, think that their freedom from regulation, their freedom from law, gives them access to a consciousness, really, to be able to shape America, and [to] shape it in their interests.

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Photo Credit: Austin Bean

Like the protagonist of Junk, Robert Merkin.

I want to show that Merkin is making the world. He’s concocting it. He’s a magician, really. He’s saying we can turn hope into a spreadsheet. You hope for a return? Give me a hundred thousand dollars, and I will fulfill that hope.

But don’t I have to want money to be in that game at all?

To the extent that you don’t, you unfortunately are not part of the dominant conversation. And that’s the great tragedy. De Tocqueville in 1805 was very clear about that. What is American greatness? He actually talks about American greatness. There’s no great freedom that the American Republic represents that Europeans don’t have, other than freedom of commerce. That’s what the US excels at. So we intellectuals are always at the margins of society, but here we are so far in the margins to be any part of that conversation. And that’s the great American conversation.

You know, I think we’re also in a weird cultural moment where we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking that we’re addressing the issues with all of this identity stuff. It has nothing to do with the real problems. The aquafers are going to be empty. The southwestern American aquafers, the Punjab Indus Valley – we’re talking 26 million people in the Indian subcontinent are going to have to move. The notion of the nation state is going to be pulverized beyond recognition. If you think Syria is bad, Syria looks like Romper Room compared to what’s coming. And we’re talking about – I don’t know – what bathroom we should be using. It’s astonishing to me.

And the collapse of the center of this country has to do with a much larger philosophical shift but, at root, the reason we’re in trouble is you can’t abandon the well-being of the entire middle of the country. Town after town, major city after major city across the country is losing newspapers. Increasingly, there’s nothing left but these kind of transnational distributors and purveyors of data information services and ideology. And so locality is being obliterated in the process of this expanding transnational economic cancer. That’s really what it is -- this kind of expanded customer model of citizenship, as evinced and espoused by Amazon, that we are members of a republic of customers and that our every whim has to be attended to. And the fact that the only meaningful political agency we have is to purchase. We are now beholden to devices that have transformed the very act of consciousness into streams of revenue. Our cognition is dependent on those devices. They are doing our cognition for us in accordance with algorithms whose sole value -- whose sole goal -- is economic optimization. Is it any surprise that, as we now increasingly farm out all of our cognitive functions to devices run by algorithms whose sole good is economic, our entire world is increasingly becoming an economic graph full of data points.

So there’s that and there’s climate change.

But I think they’re connected—because, I think, we are prisoners of a civilization that has enshrined the materialist abstraction as our deity. And that materialist abstraction is capital. And capital is conceived as something that is never returned to the cycle of decay. Capital must always grow. There is no winter in the life of capital. And what sets that in motion is a kind of bedrock philosophical principle in which progress and growth at all costs are the only things. And that means we are living totally at odds with the very cycle of nature. We have no respect for the planet. We have no respect for our natural liquidity. We are committed to an idea which we have effectively enshrined in this material abstraction of capital. That is our religion. We have all the hallmarks of mythical thinking with this stuff. It’s that abstraction that we always monitor with all of these mysterious practices and numbers and statistics whose well-being we care about more than our own well-being. When the economy is good, we are a happy people. When the economy is falling, presages of doom are never far. We placate the economy with our ritual purchases. It’s all mythic thinking. It’s just the materialist version of it. We are mythic creatures. And to the extent that we don’t have a natural place in the order of things–a place that includes loss and death and the ability to be connected to very tangible and perhaps productive formulations of ultimate meaning—we are destroying ourselves and the planet. And how is this illusion of constant growth kept alive? Debt!

Which brings us back to Junk.

There’s no way to fight the array of power that has now been enshrined, really, in the institutions that we have. I think this is the real meaning of Trump’s election. It was a big FU to the system, right? But of course the irony is that he’s one of those. He’s a sort of sock puppet for the entire thing, emphasis being on the sock puppet. But I don’t know.

I read a piece that argues that Trump’s so-called base believes in democracy—as we’ve all been raised to believe—but feels completely unrepresented in ours and so has acted democratically by voting for this autocrat.

It seems to me that democracy is this thing that seems to endlessly sing its own praises. And in the process it has lost, at least in this country and I think worldwide, it has lost faith with the “demos,” with the people. Because democracy has proven entirely ineffective at dealing with the rise of transnational power – the transnational corporate, technological and financial innovation that is the real political order of our time. And so our democracies are not serving the demos, they are not providing a meaningful check against this concussive power.

So it is perfectly natural that the demos should now wish for an effective check and it is only authoritarianism that is promising that – while the most nuanced of our leaders, the most far-thinking and intelligent, don’t seem to have a clue what is being asked for and offer us ridiculous moral triumphs instead: the righting of historical wrongs, the celebration of identity, the increasingly limitless promise of individual franchise of all forms. None of that is going to solve the problem. But we are told by the smartest of our leaders that these are the solutions. So of course the people have lost faith with democracy. And they’re only going to continue to lose faith with democracy because the reality is that democracy is not responding to their needs.

We live in a corporate totalitarian system which taxes us and in which we have no representation. It is classic taxation without representation. It mirrors the founding complaint of our republic. That’s what we’re dealing with. That’s why the demos, the people, wish for a strong man, whatever the consequences. And you know what? They’re not wrong to wish that because nobody else is responding to the issues.

I apologize for the jeremiad.

I’m grateful for it. Do you talk like this in all your interviews?

People don’t seem to want to hear this right now. I do go around from time to time and speak to some of these things, but I think we’re in some weird reality where we don’t want to hear these kinds of things. For the most part, I think people want to hear what I have to say about Muslims. They want to know what the problems are for Muslims. I feel like it’s hard to escape that, given my background, but by the same token I feel like what unites me with my fellow Americans, if you will, is more important right now than what differentiates me from them. And I think that’s because of the moment that we’re living in.

“Junk” opens Jan. 18 with previews Jan. 16-17 and runs through Feb. 17 in the Milwaukee Repertory Theater’s Quadracci Powerhouse at 108 E. Wells St.