Insider Offers His View of Life on Wall Street : Stage: Jerry Sterner left the business eight years ago to become a playwright. ‘Other People’s Money’ is his treatment of the world of the ‘deal.’

Garfinkel and Kate are going to name their twins Bull and Bear. The line may be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s symptomatic of their times--and of the bitter humor of Jerry Sterner’s very serious comedy, “Other People’s Money,” opening Saturday at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage. It’s also symptomatic that the playwright says their relationship is “no love story; it’s a seduction.”

Kate is a fiery, idealistic lawyer fighting the takeover of her family’s venerable but failing company by a Wall Street operator. The seduction is not physical. It’s one of ideals--Kate’s ideals of how things ought to be. She learns from Garfinkel that times have changed and that to survive she has to move with the current.

Sterner spent his life on Wall Street and knows the territory. When he decided to get out of the financial whirlpool eight years ago at the age of 44 to become a playwright, he knew what he wanted to say about the people who operate with other people’s money.

He is convinced that “we’re in for some very difficult times. We’re the only generation that has deliberately made it worse for our children than we had it for ourselves. Every other generation has always sacrificed to make it better for the next generation. We have mortgaged the next several generations to make it better for ourselves. As a government, as corporate America and as individuals, we’re up to our eyeballs in debt.

“We had a grand party in the 1980s, and we will pay for that party--and worse yet, our children and our children’s children will probably pay for that party.”

Milton Katselas, the director guiding the Old Globe production, agrees, but thinks Garfinkel’s philosophy has been around a long time. He remembers when “you did business on a handshake, and there was a certain kind of etiquette, a certain kind of ethics. It’s a different ballgame now.” But he also believes that “we can’t hold this country up as this great ethical thing. I understand Jerry’s concern. The mortgage part is new, but the rest of it has been with us from the get-go. Twenty-four dollars for Manhattan Island is not exactly a fair deal.”

Before moving the company to San Diego just after Christmas, Los Angeles resident Katselas began rehearsals for the San Diego production in the same small Los Angeles theater where his long-running acclaimed “Romeo and Juliet” played several years ago. This is the first property he has been interested in directing since then. Jerry “is telling us the way it is, and yet it’s got a point of view that maybe all of us have wanted to utter at one time or another on both sides of the fence. Jerry has taken a subject and given both sides their due, and, in the end, you’ve got to make your choice.

“The play’s important above and beyond the coterie of people who really know the ‘deal,’ because this is a choice we’re now being faced with, a new economic structure and a new way of looking at things. There’s all this stuff going on about ethics in business. It’s very current, it’s right now. It’s in the news.”

Katselas smiles. “The other thing about it is, it’s funny. “

Surprisingly, the “coterie of people who really know the ‘deal’ ” actually were the very audience that first turned Sterner’s play into an off-Broadway hit--one that is still running at New York’s Minetta Lane Theatre. For months, one-block-long Minetta Lane was nightly lined with limousines.

“Limos! Limos!” laughs the playwright. “It’s where the play found its initial audience, essentially non-theatergoers. They might go once a year on a benefit because their wife schlepped them, you know, to see ‘Phantom,’ with this pained look on their faces.”

The play found a Wall Street audience, he says, “because it’s about deals that these guys have done.” Then it began to attract people from other parts of the business world, and finally, because of its humor and its human concerns, finding fans in general audiences.

Even the play’s purported villain is ultimately human. In most plays and films, Sterner says, “businessmen are portrayed in stereotyped ways as being just malicious, greedy, soulless people who’d sell their mother for a quarter. Garfinkel is not like that. Yeah, he’s interested in money, but he’s got a point of view. He comes on like he’s the villain, but in the end we must question ourselves--there’s a little bit of Garfinkel in all of us. That’s what the audience suddenly catches on to.”

Even the financial wizards who made the play a success sometimes catch on. “They feel their own position is vindicated,” Sterner said, “but they do have misgivings as they watch it. I’ve had investment bankers say to me, ‘We never related to the idea that people actually get hurt here.’ They don’t have to go out and say to a factory worker, ‘Listen, I’m sorry mac, but I’m going to have to let you go, we’re closing this plant.’ In the play, maybe for the first time, they do see the effect of what does happen. People have said to me, ‘You’ve made it harder to do what we have to do.’ But it doesn’t stop ‘em from doing it.”

Sterner, now 52, has definitely settled into being a writer. The movie version of “Other People’s Money” is being filmed (with Danny DeVito as Garfinkel and Penelope Ann Miller as Kate), Sterner is developing a television series about Wall Street with Ron Howard’s production company, and he has agreed to write the book for a musical about politics.

His most avid interest lies in writing for the theater, however. He is not concerned with either his late start or the playwright’s low return. “My heart’s in the theater, and I don’t need the money. There are a lot of disadvantages to becoming a playwright at 44, but the one advantage--which overshadows all the dis advantages--is you have something to write about. You’ve lived a life, you’ve experienced things--most kids are writing plays about kids writing plays. Who wants to see that? Maybe their mothers.”

From Wall Street to theater may seem like a big jump, but for Sterner, it was an easy crossover. In that one way he may be a little like Garfinkel in the play. Kate tells him they’ll pass laws and put the Garfinkels out of business. Garfinkel answers coolly that they can pass all the laws they like. All they do is change the rules. They can’t stop the game. “I don’t go away,” Garfinkel says, “I adapt.”

So does Jerry Sterner.

“Other People’s Money” opens today at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage in Balboa Park and runs through Feb. 24. Performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. There will be 7 p.m. performances on Feb. 6 and 7.