How Do You Explain Leveraged Buyouts to a Broadway Audience?

“This is the story of how kings are made,” a jaded journalist proclaims at the start of Junk, the latest play from Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar. “Or what passes for kings these days.”

Financiers who lived through the dizzy 1980s will remember the era of Wall Street royalty, when a new guard of dealmakers began to see debt differently, as a thing of value. As investors chased yield, they embraced risk with zeal—and the most voracious among them were rewarded with mountains of cash. In Akhtar’s cautionary study of the period, in previews at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater, an older financier can’t get his head around the core of what came to be called “creative financing.” “Debt is not an asset,” he declares. “Debt is debt!”