Other People’s Money — director’s programme note (2006)

2006 season · Programme note

Production: Other People’s Money
Director: Janet DeRuvo
Ran: May 5 – June 17, 2006

The note, as printed

The Ultimate Seduction. Is Other People’s Money a case of greed and avarice, or one of liberation at the expense of a tragic hero?

In the throes of the ’80s junk bonds and corporate takeovers, the ultimate seduction of power and money consumed Wall Street. This high-stakes, fast-paced world of legally trading stock in companies targeted for extinction — “a paper transaction” with no concern for the workers, only the stockholders — is alien to the philosophies of those who built businesses on the backs of the small communities in which they live. Loyalty and morality take on new meanings as business ethics grey and the rules change.

Is Andrew Jorgenson a tragic hero? By definition a hero is one who is in a high position, responsible for his or her own fate, doomed to make a fatal error, and by so doing meets a tragic end — and we feel sorry for him. The saying “pride cometh before the fall” is as true now as it ever was. Jorgy’s intense confidence and pride in the company is fodder for debate as to its true value. Those working for him end up as pawns in a game they haven’t been asked to join.

Garfinkle plays the game to the benefit of the stockholders. Does this make him a liquidator or a liberator? Jerry Sterner, businessman turned playwright, wrote in 1995: “Just talk about restructuring as positive and investors will buy it. It’s really an admission of failure: we’re closing this operation and firing these people so that we can stay in business. But we ain’t paying the price. The employees, the community, they pay the price.”

And the female element? Smart and sexy, fleeing the confines of the small town, playing the game in a man’s world — is Kate part of the prize, or the prize itself? Resistant, defensive, but worthy of playing the game. You decide — and cast your votes.

PS — Other People’s Money has been studied at Cornell University in the Business Ethics programme.

A stack of blank vintage theatre programmes and folded playbills on a dark oak table — Programme notes are the most perishable part of a theatre’s record. Five of the Vic’s survive because they were published online.

Why this survives

This note was printed in the spring of 2006, roughly eighteen months before the financial crisis made its questions considerably less theoretical. It is the longest of the five programme notes the Denver Victorian published, and the only one that argues with its own play rather than introducing it.

The production page carries the synopsis, the cast and the run dates. The staging was a remount of a 1999 production of the same play in the same building, under earlier ownership.

This page is part of the production archive of the Denver Victorian Playhouse, a seventy-five-seat theatre in the basement of a northwest Denver house that staged its last performance in 2011. Details here are restored from the theatre’s own records as they were published at the time; press quotations are reproduced with their original attributions and nothing has been added to them.