“This is a story of kings, or what passes as kings these days.” These words introduce Junk, a zippy and highly entertaining tragicomedy by Ayad Akhtar (a Pulitzer winner for his debut play Disgraced), now showing at Arena Stage. With a title so blunt, you’d expect a total evisceration of the financial sector in particular, and American capitalism in general. Akhtar instead throws a curveball. Junk is surprisingly generous and uninterested in stoking outrage from a sympathetic audience.

Set during the savings-and-loan orgy of the mid-1980s, the “kings” in question are Wall Street types, who use Rube Goldberg-style financial schemes—the so-called “junk” bonds that give the play its title—to gobble up flailing businesses, presumably to turn them around, to make them profitable again. Truth is, their hostile takeovers are just quick payouts financed through risky debt, the Big Money version of flipping a house on a NINJA loan. There’s an intricate calculus to these financiers’ bottom line, and human cost isn’t part of the general ledger.

A lesser playwright would’ve pitted pure virtue against vice, the white hats versus the black hats. But Junk is more nuanced, a study in grayscale. Our protagonist-slash-supervillain is Bob Merkin (the sad-eyed Thomas Keegan), a substitute for Michael Milken, whose diabolical avarice is expressed with, what seems to be, genuine warmth. With the help of a hapless frontman (Jonathan David Martin), he sinks his raptor talons into a family-run manufacturing business, pitting him against its blowhard owner (Edward Gero). Little does Merkin know, investigators from the Southern District of New York are hot on his trail, led by a rising-star attorney (Nicholas Baroudi) with grand aspirations. Meanwhile, Merkin’s somewhat kinder rival (David Andrew Macdonald) has his own entanglement with a business journalist (Nancy Sun), who’s reporting on the whole affair.

Junk explores familiar terrain previously covered on screens, both small and big, by Barbarians at the Gate and The Big Short. But this stylish and minimalistic production, directed by Jackie Maxwell, still feels fresh and vital. Jason Lyons’ expert lighting design, for example, dramatizes the back-and-forth telephone game behind the flimsy conspiracy that soon collapses with a spectacular crash.

I hesitate to call Junk fun, because the human toll implicit in this story’s aftermath was, and still is, real. And yet, the breakneck pace of all this awfulness multiplies exponentially as the show barrels to its conclusion. The tragic becomes comic. And the farce begins anew.

Junk runs through May 5 at Arena Stage. Tickets $41-$105. Runtime two hours with no intermission.

This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Ayad Akhtar’s name.