STAGE REVIEW : ‘Serious Money’: Wheeling and Dealing at Berkeley Rep

Mix the knowing, acid badinage of Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls,” the unashamed theatricality of her “Cloud 9” and the latest headlines involving corporate raiders and stock market intrigues, topped with a dizzying, daffy plot line (a who’s who flow chart is provided with each program), and you might begin to sense the entertaining complexity of Churchill’s “Serious Money.”

The Berkeley Repertory Theatre pulled off a coup by snatching up this critical and popular hit before any of the major Los Angeles theaters grabbed it. One could picture the theatrical bidding war, and relish the irony that it was over a play that so caustically and brilliantly skewers today’s bloodthirsty and money-hungry arbitrageurs, stock traders and masters of the “hostile takeover.”

Once having grabbed the prize, however, Anthony Taccone and Sharon Ott’s production have taken a superb play only so far. The full payoff of “Serious Money” on the page can only be imagined, since this isn’t nearly as exciting a show as it could be.

In some ways even more than Tom Stoppard--one of her few peers--Churchill has mastered the teeter-tottering act of frolicsome denseness, where Brechtian directness faces off with a bubbly comedy of manners and somehow finds a balance.

Perhaps only Churchill, for instance, could get away with a scene where a sly Peruvian capitalist named Jacinta Condor (Cordelia Gonzalez) is flying (via Concorde) across the Atlantic for a deal in “The City,” the center of London finance and the play’s action. As with most of them, this joke doesn’t hit you until a moment after delivery, yet the political sting is just as felt. It’s as if Sheridan had come back to rewrite the plays of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

The Berkeley design team has fully grasped this. Kent Dorsey’s set places the stock exchange trading floor and offices within a proscenium of Greco-Roman decay, the very icon of Empire. Dunya Ramicova’s costumes wittily, but without exaggeration, demarcate the floor lackeys from the boardroom honchos. Peter Maradudin’s lights move with comic strip speed but lend the numerous soliloquies a classical aura.

Those soliloquies are less introspective than explanatory of Thatcher-era business methods. And it’s here that we’re faced with the problem of American actors trying to emotionally connect with a text that deliberately flies away from conventional “feelings” at every juncture.

Churchill begins her comedy with a scene from Thomas Shadwell’s Restoration satire of ruthless speculators, “The Stock Jobbers,” not just to establish that greed merchants are nothing new. She’s also setting a cool tone with a distant yet engrossed perspective on these foolish mortals.

Churchill’s text is also in verse--sometimes free, sometimes very rhymed. The verbal style, in its own way, is a kind of costume for the actors in modern dress to wrap themselves in.

The rhymes, though, seldom get in the way of the character. Scilla (Lorri Holt), an eager dealer on the floor of the London International Financial Futures Exchange (LIFFE), comments at one point that “if it was insider dealing, it’s not a proper crime like stealing.” She may be righteously hunting down her brother’s murderer, but she knows why she’s in the game.

Holt is very funny during these moments; her Scilla appears to start walking toward the ethical high ground, then suddenly snaps out of it, as it was a bad dream. Few in this cast, though, rise to that level of irony, which creates a gap between the language’s observant comedy and the slightly hamstrung delivery on stage.

It’s no accident that the evening’s funniest scene has many of the key takeover players--including Zackerman, an American banker (James Carpenter) and Billy Corman, a second-rate Ivan Boesky (Charles Dean)--out on a fox-hunting holiday. The laughs come, not from the lines, but from the physical action: Each actor plays the character from the torso up, and the character’s horse from the torso down.

Taccone and Ott’s cast is in shape, but they haven’t penetrated Churchill’s peculiarly British depths. Where the show hits the mark is in the manic trading floor scenes, abetted by Ian Dury’s tongue-in-cheek “Futures Song,” in which a haggle of young apprentices climb over each other to get the right stock deals for their companies. It’s as if the Chicago Grain Exchange was led by a pumped-up NCAA cheer squad.

For “Serious Money” to succeed on stage, we must get caught up in the excitement of the money game, the better to see what seduces the players--winners and losers alike. On the Berkeley Rep theater floor, we need more bulls.

At 2025 Addison St., Berkeley, on Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m., July 13, 2 p.m. Tickets: $17-$23; (415) 845-4700.