STAGE REVIEW : Wall Street Gets Off Easy : ‘Other People’s Money’ at Old Globe Is Soft Satire of a High-Finance Takeover

Larry the Liquidator is smacking his lips. He has spotted New England Wire and Cable on his menu. With an enviable balance sheet--but a declining market--it’s ripe for a takeover. Larry Garfinkle is determined to make a meal out of it, leaving nothing but the bones.

As depicted by Jerry Sterner, Larry is a man of enormous but eventually debilitating appetites. He lives on doughnuts, cigarettes, and “Other People’s Money”--which doubles as the title of Sterner’s play about this Wall Street predator, at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Larry probably would like Sterner’s play. Like his beloved doughnuts, it would give him a lot of momentary satisfaction--he is by far the flashiest character in it. It depicts him as crass but funny, and it endows him with an extremely unlikely sex appeal. Not surprisingly, the Wall Street crowd apparently consumed this play with relish in New York.

That Larry would like it so much should be a warning flare for everyone else. Sterner tsks-tsks Larry’s behavior, but he hardly makes a devastating case against it. The satire here is weak-kneed.

The subtitle for the play in New York (though not in the Old Globe program) is “. . . the ultimate seduction,” and Sterner apparently felt it was necessary to make the play as seductive as possible in order to enliven what some might see as a saga about abstract paper-pushing. So Larry’s chief antagonist, defending the interests of New England Wire and Cable, is not just another “suit”--she’s Kate, a glamorous young attorney who apparently likes nothing better than to trade dubious double-entendres with Larry.

Yet we don’t really appreciate the cost of their mutual seduction. We hear the old chairman of New England Wire and Cable earnestly defending the idea of his business as a family of real people who will be hurt by Larry’s paper-pushing, but we don’t meet any of those people.

In fact, the only people we meet other than Larry

and Kate are the chairman, his longtime assistant Bea (who, not coincidentally, is also Kate’s mother), and the nervous company president. These three work to stop Larry, but they will not be his primary victims. Sterner makes certain that all of them have considerable financial cushions, should Larry succeed.

Larry thinks of what he does as a game--and Sterner plays along with that concept too enthusiastically. The essays in the program serve somewhat to underline the stakes in this game, and so does Sterner in interviews, but the play itself is so eager to demonstrate how high finance can be sexy and funny and beguilingly shady that it neglects to make us feel the gravity of what’s going on.

Milton Katselas’ staging develops the script’s assets but doesn’t do enough to fill up the debit column. Robert Walden’s Larry is a case in point.

He’s amusing all right, with a useful repertory of body English at his disposal. But his whiny, weaselly manner never seems frightening or intimidating. Walden also may suffer from having been seen too often on television. Anyone who has watched him on TV knows that Walden is really a skinny guy. While he has been stuffed up to look as “immense” (the word used to describe Larry in the script) as possible, it’s hard for him to overcome our initial impression that he’s wearing a fat suit. If there were a pressure group on behalf of fat actors, they would have cause to complain about this casting.

Gorgeous Laura Johnson does a splendid Murphy Brown impression as Kate, which is probably the only way to approach this role. Richard Herd captures the spry authority of the genial but stubborn company chairman, and Sarah Marshall lets us know that the chairman’s trusted helpmate has a long history of knowing when to speak and when to hold her tongue.

Allen Williams has the play’s most potentially intriguing role--the company president who expresses, in action as well as in words, an ambivalence that’s lacking in the other characters. Perhaps the play should have been about him. At any rate, Williams capably projects the man’s buttoned-down anxiety.

Cliff Faulkner’s two-office set goes overboard in indicating the folksy, hands-on quality of the chairman’s personality, and Shigeru Yaji’s costumes feed from the same stereotype. Jeff Ladman’s sound track cleverly uses a jazzy “Jaws”-like riff as Larry’s theme.

‘OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY’

The Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Balboa Park, San Diego, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Feb. 24. $17.50-$28.50. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.