A Funny Ride to the Go-Go ’80s

There are many ways to respond to “Other

People’s Money,” which is being performed

at the Center Stage of the Southampton Cultural

Center through Feb. 6 under the direction of

Michael Disher.

The first knee-jerk reaction might be “too soon.”

It’s a play about Wall Street fat cats manipulating

the stock and good name of small companies to take

them down for their own profit, thereby ruining the

lives of their workers, who might actually have been

creating useful, tangible products.

Maybe those who are still lying in the ruins of the

past decade’s real estate bubble and the Wall Street arbitragers

who pushed the market to its edge and then

over the cliff do not want to see a play about how an

honest man running a family business has to fend off

greedy invaders just for running a positive balance

sheet.

The other immediate response might be “how

quaint.”

While the 1989 play touches on themes that were

similarly resonant at the end of that decade’s go-go

market, it almost seems innocent in the face of the

complexities of today’s financial market machinations.

Derivatives were barely in the national vocabulary

back then, reserved for back office analytical eggheads.

They were the ones who were beginning to see how

something of little to no value — junk bonds of companies

with no assets in the 1980s, or in today’s version

subprime mortgages — could be spun off into

something maybe not of value, but at least marketable.

And those seeing the folly could even invest in those

new securities’ failure, having no other stake in the

outcome of the failed enterprise other than their own

investments.

Here, the plot is more basic. Andrew Jorgenson, a

Jimmy Stewart character if there ever was one, was

played in the movie by an apt substitute, Gregory

Peck. He’s an honest but not terribly dynamic man

who has inherited and run a company left to him by

his father sometime in his youth.

Terrance Fiore is terrific in the role, appropriately

wooden and dull when required and fired up and even

wily at other times. His Jorgy, as the character is called,

is a product of a different era and different region’s value

system than the modern New York City represented

by Lawrence Garfinkle, or “Larry the Liquidator”

as he is known on “the Street.” Jorgy is headstrong

in his conviction that he is on the right side of

things and that honest hard work and good deeds will

be rewarded.

He’s not a saint, however. He has relied on and even

possibly taken advantage of the good nature and affection

of his loyal assistant Bea Sullivan, played by

Mary Ellen Roche, since he hired her decades ago.

The two have been in love for many years, but Bea,

now a widow, was married and had a child through

most of her association with Jorgy and his company.

New England Wire and Cable, based in Rhode Island,

has muddled along, slightly outdated by the materials

it’s been manufacturing but ready to shift focus

to meet a new demand in the marketplace, when Larry

the Liquidator comes calling. He’s buying stock in

large amounts and his interest has been noted by

William Coles, the number two in charge at the company

who has been waiting patiently for Jorgy to retire

so he can take the mantle he’s been promised.

Things begin in a civil fashion, but it soon becomes

clear that Larry’s intentions are not benign. He wants

a “restructuring,” which in the parlance of the day

means taking the company apart to sell off its more

valuable assets to maximize the shareholders’ value,

which as Jorgy notes, “sounds like going out of business

to me.” This is a move that would leave his employees

out of job, the area out of its sole economic

driver, and his family without a legacy.

Played by Daniel Becker, Larry is a shark, a weasel,

a snake, and a sleaze. He has been doing what he has

been doing for so long, he no longer sees anything bad

about it, “it’s just doing business.” It is not personal,

he says, he just wants what every stockholder wants.

Jorgy is not convinced and won’t make a deal with

Larry, nor does he believe that the core investors in his

company, mostly local people, would ever cede their