Last Call: Junk: The Golden Age of Debt and Free Speech (While Supplies Last)

Two shows at La Jolla Playhouse must close this Sunday. Taken together, they’re practically a cause and effect of where we are today.

Junk: The Golden Age of Debt. It's 1985, and Robert Merkin’s on to something. The Wall Street whiz has found a way to make debt — via junk bonds and leveraged buy-outs — not just an “asset,” but somehow sexy. His walks on the wild side make 100 percent returns for his clients.

“Debt,” he says, sounding like a self-help guru bent on seducing his flock, is not a shameful end, but “a new beginning.”

Now he plans the “Deal of the Decade”: make a move for Everson Steel — the first move ever for a Dow Jones Industrial.

In Ayad Akhtar’s fascinating three-act drama, Merkin lays siege to the company — on paper. He assaults with promises, seeks fissures in Everson’s financial walls, gains cahoots with insiders. But the paper siege has real consequences, threatening the lives of over 10,000 workers.

Akhtar, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, depicts the rise and fall of Robert Merkin (aka Michael Milken, “the Junk Bond King”) and many others in his wake. This is a big, sweeping drama that moves, under Doug Hughes’s crisp direction and stopwatch precise design work, at the speed of a ticker-tape.

Playing through Sunday, August 21

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Free Speech (While Supplies Last). Junk tells us how we got here. Second City’s part-improv, part-scripted show’s an up-to-the-minute look at where we are, and what we can do with a “while supplies last” urgency. The company announces — this is after God decides to retire because people make for a “hostile work environment” — that they will exercise their First Amendment rights. And they do, with humor but also with unrepressed salvos at the state of things today.

One of the funniest ranks among the most horrific: Bang is an “Artisanal Firearms Boutique” in Brooklyn, where shopping’s a New Age experience. Guns kill people, they admit, but their munitions don’t. Instead they hasten one’s destiny.

The bits can be uneven. Those based on audience suggestions obviously depending on the quality of the suggestion.

In an age of texts and tweets and the pseudo-personal, Free Speech unfolds like a throwback to former times, when people met around a campfire or at a town hall and talked things out face-to-face. It’s a measure of where we are that live audiences often experience discomfort when speaking to a group. They’d much rather project themselves by selfie or cower behind a pseudonym and make their points by proxy.

In this sense the Mandell Weiss Forum’s aptly named. Free Speech can become an open forum for exchanging ideas, gripes, hopes, and fears, accompanied by levity.

Playing through Sunday, August 21