With most of our 401(k)s and stock portfolios hemorrhaging money and the economy apparently heading for a recession, you might think that Sarah Burgess’s dark-toned Dry Powder, a financial comedy, was written yesterday instead of 2016.
Set mainly in the upscale offices of a New York capital management firm, amid the jargon-spewing and back-stabbing of its rival wheeler-dealers, the play contain as unlikeable a group of characters as you may ever encounter. If you already suspect that these folks are venal and greedy, you could probably pass on seeing Dry Powder, for that is the prime message of its 90 intermissionless minutes.
In the Boca Stage production, directed with powder-dry humor by Genie Croft, we first meet Rick (Wayne LeGette), the fat cat founder and president of KMM Capital Management, who is having a really bad day. After throwing himself an excessive $1 million engagement party at the same time that he forced huge layoffs at a supermarket chain he recently acquired, the press got wind of the shindig — which featured a live elephant, maybe two — and now his investors are drying up.
Meanwhile, Rick’s two underling partners, a cutthroat numbers-cruncher named Jenny (Autumn Kioti Horne) and her only slightly less brutal rival, Seth (Michael Scott Ross), are jockeying for Rick’s approval on the options for acquiring an upscale Sacramento luggage company. Seth wants to guarantee that none of the manufacturer’s employees will lose their jobs in the deal, while Jenny is indifferent to that concern, calculating major cost savings by moving the business offshore to, say, Bangladesh.
The play’s title refers to funds on hand available for investing, but could also describe the parched technical argot sprinkled throughout the dialogue. If ever there were a play that could benefit from a glossary, Dry Powder is it. This could well be how financial folks talk to each other, but too much of the lingo conveys too little to mere laymen.
With the theater in need of new villains, Dry Powder takes a cue from the movies which have long targeted stock traders and mergers and acquisition merchants. Think of Wall Street, Margin Call, even the real estate shysters of Glengarry Glen Ross. If you enjoyed those, perhaps you will be entertained by Dry Powder.
The difference is we grew to care about the connivers that populate those films, while we remain indifferent to the characters of Dry Powder. Even Jeff Schrader (Christopher Dreeson), the CEO of Landmark Luggage, for all his talk about concern for his employees, is willing to sell them out if the price is right.
Burgess’s characters are disappointingly two-dimensional, but the Boca Stage cast does what it can to overcome those liabilities. As Rick, the firm’s head honcho, Boca Stage fixture LeGette makes snap judgments with an eye always on the bottom line and he wears Timothy Charles Bowman’s designer suits well. Horne’s Jenny gets most of the play’s best lines and delivers them with deadly accuracy. By comparison, Ross’s Seth and Dreeson’s Schrader seem worthy of our empathy, but that ultimately proves to be an illusion.
So if you need to like any of the characters you are watching — not an unreasonable request — Dry Powder is probably not the play for you. Burgess might have given these folks a shred of redemption, but that is not the story she has in mind.
DRY POWDER, Boca Stage at Delray Beach Playhouse, 950 NW 9th St., Delray Beach. Through Sunday, May 4. $59-$69. Call 561-272-1261 or visit delraybeachplayhouse.org.