STAGE REVIEW : ‘Other People’s Money’: Debits Outweight Assets

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 written by Jerry Sterner, Larry is a man of enormous but eventually debilitating appetites. He lives on doughnuts, cigarettes and “Other People’s Money”--which is also 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.

That Larry would like it so much should be a warning flare for everyone else. Sterner tsk-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 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. He 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 is amusing, all right, with a useful repertory of body English at his disposal. But his whiny, weasely manner never seems frightening or intimidating. Furthermore, 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’s he’s wearing a fat suit. Pressure groups for fat actors 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.