Play a Day: Junk Bonds

Lucy Wang

For Sunday, I read Junk Bonds by Lucy Wang whose work is posted at New Play Exchange.

Here's a story. Twenty-five years, I had burned my prospects to the ground. My ex-wife was gone, my theater company had broken up, I was waiting tables, living alone, and needed a hernia operation.

So naturally, I auditioned for a play.

In 1994 Junk Bonds received the Chilcote Award for Best Play at the Cleveland Public Theatre 13th Annual New Plays Festival, and received a full production there in May 1995.

I believed I was perfect for the role of Connor, a hyperkinetic trader in his early 30s and losing his hair, but instead was offered the role of Kent, an ex-Marine in his "early-to-mid 40s" which is to say someone entirely unlike me. I was sorely miscast and should have turned down the part outright, and that is a lesson I offer to my young protégés. You feel like you have to say yes to absolutely everything, even if it doesn't feel right. I tell them there is always another play.

The scene is a financial services firm, the plot regarding one trader sinking the company through incremental, overwhelming loss. A quarter century on, the script is as relevant as ever. But it is a time capsule from when the trading floor was dominated by men and the business was done almost entirely over the phone. Before the internet, before 9/11, before the housing meltdown of 2008, and yet it could happen again.

Wang's rapid-fire banter, chatter and verbal abuse is deliriously loopy, poetry in and of itself, where masculaine toxicity is a sport, one the protagonist Diana, a Chinese-American, the new girl, has to learn or lose.

I didn't understand half of what I was saying, way back then. That's okay, the director didn't either. What I should have caught was the use of the word "junk" as in heroin. Because this play is totally about addiction.

Who should I read tomorrow?