OFF BROADWAY REVIEWS : Popularity Is Common Bond for ‘Daisy,’ ‘Serious Money’

Two plays are selling out Off Broadway--”Driving Miss Daisy” at the John Houseman and “Serious Money” at the Public Theatre. They could hardly be better or more different.

“Daisy,” by Alfred Uhry (he wrote “The Robber Bridegroom”), is a love story--an uncompromising examination of the enduring support and affection between an elderly school teacher and the elderly black man hired by her son to drive her around after she sent her car flying off the road. It is tender, taut, unsentimental.

“Serious Money” also is unsentimental. It’s a terminally cynical, cash-hard, cold and funny comedy about life in London’s deregulated world of international high finance. Playwright Caryl Churchill, who can always be counted on to do the unexpected, worked in close collaboration with director Max Stafford-Clark. The play may be English (it came to the Public via London’s Royal Court) but it trades in the universal currency of scandal: the inside trading scandals of England and America, where greed is not just good--greed is God.

But “Daisy” first. This vignette, written by Uhry about his own grandmother, is a light-handed duet for two actors. It is gorgeously fulfilled by Dana Ivey as the haughty, failing, unrelentingly proud Miss Daisy, and Morgan Freeman as Hoke, her gentle-but-firm man in attendance. There isn’t much of a plot, just a loving and meticulous chronicling of some fairly humdrum events in the working out of an extended emotional and, subliminally, racial relationship between those two.

The play’s elegance lies in the delicate way in which Uhry has created the leverage, constructing it block by block on a mountain of minutiae that are the fiber of daily life. They may not be great theater in the cosmic sense, these little scenes of domestic resistance and adjustment on that reluctant journey into age, but they make for a tremendously rewarding experience because the play is so much the result of a true confluence of artists: a playwright with an affecting nonstory to tell and the ability to do it well, actors with the talent to inhabit their roles in the ineffably precise measure required, and a director--Ron Lagomarsino--who has made chamber music of it all.

Quite a contrast from the Public’s raucous entry, “Serious Money.”

“Money” takes place on the floors of London’s financial markets, its Wall Street counterparts, in bars and the other habitats of its main-game players. But it is not about place or feelings or even things. It’s about acquisition. Getting rich for its own sake. For the sheer frantic, frenzied thrill.

There is a sketchy, confusing plot launched by the death of a dealer--a probable suicide, suspected by some to be a murder. It’s complicated by a sister determined to find her brother’s killers, as she chugs her way through a maze of leveraged deals-and-more-deals among international traders, brokers, consultants, public relations people, arbitragers, raiders and other crooks.

They move in a whirlwind of impossible appointment schedules (a very funny moment), casual treachery and nonallegiance, all but drowned out by jangling telephones, blinking computers, wrangling voices, rattling words (Churchill’s) and audacious songs (music and lyrics by Ian Dury, Micky Gallagher and Chas Jankel) whose refrains come in highly sexist four-letter words.

Technically, it’s a very tough show, which makes its achievement all the more singular. The signs and language of the stock market are thoroughly abstruse and only add to the bewilderment. With a tough edge of gallows humor, “Serious Money” disgorges a hair-raising world of humanoid despoilers who’d sell each other and their mothers for the sake of one thing: making deals. Everyone can be bought.

Churchill has written all this in peculiar rhymed couplets, filled with a jocular rapacity (“One thing I learned working for Mary Lou / Do other before they do you”) and the relish of indifference (“One thing one’s learned from one’s colonial masters / One makes money from other people’s disasters”). These facile semi-aphorisms are tossed off like so much confetti steeped in cyanide.

Except for Meera Syal as seductive Peruvian piranha Jacinta Condor, Joanne Pearce as Scilla Todd (the sister in search of the brother’s killers) and the delicious Linda Bassett playing, alternately, American arbitrageur Mary Lou Baines, a nasal stockbroker called Etherington and public relations person Dolcie Starr, who will dream up the best sex scandals for the sake of a front-page story, “Serious Money” is an ensemble effort in as true a sense as were Churchill’s “Cloud Nine” and “Fen.” The actors all combine to do a super job.

“Driving Miss Daisy,” which continues to sell out, recently recouped all of its $175,000 investment. Joseph Papp has just canceled three plays and put a fourth on hold for the first time in the history of his downtown Public Theater because his long-lived money maker, “A Chorus Line,” which provided 10 uninterrupted seasons of good fortune at the Public, has been stalled by the stock market crash and the passage of time. Most theater companies don’t have the luxury of such pedigreed mild misfortunes. But all is not lost: He’s got “Serious Money,” with a new American cast, opening on Broadway Jan. 20. Maybe it’ll make him some more serious money.