One pits small-town values against big-city greed. The other takes an almost Freudian view of religious fundamentalism. One is a comedy with a cynical stone in its sentimental heart, the other a hard-edged drama of ideas with a rather soft-centered message.
Both of these plays, running through this weekend on area stages, embrace hot topical issues. Other People's Money, at New Century Theatre, is a quarter-century old, but its Wall Street scenario is up to the minute. Dov and Ali, at Chester Theatre Company, explores the tension between Western and Muslim traditions while drawing parallels between the orthodoxies of Judaism and Islam. Both shows are compelling in different ways and each, in its own way, is thoroughly formulaic.
Other People's Money, by Jerry Sterner, was a Broadway flop in the mid-'80s but has new relevance in the current financial meltdown. It's essentially a Frank Capra story—good folks battling hollow-hearted scoundrels, complete with hopelessly old-fashioned dialogue, but with a contemporary gloss and a twist in its tail. Here the bad guy isn't nasty Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life but Larry "the Liquidator" Garfinkle, a heavyweight (in both senses) corporate raider who targets and dismembers companies that he considers are "worth more dead than alive."
His chosen prey is New England Wire and Cable, a publicly traded but community-minded business that is the main employer in a small Rhode Island town. Crusty old Mr. Jorgenson (a sweetly effective Dick Volker) runs the firm the way it's been run for 73 years: conservatively. Faced with Garfinkle's high-tech assault, he turns to Kate Sullivan, a local girl turned savvy New York attorney who relishes the opportunity to go a few rounds with the champ.
The most devilishly telling moment in Keith Langsdale's spirited production is Garfinkle's first entrance, rising menacingly out of a dark pit. All that's missing is the fire and brimstone. Ed Jewett is great as Garfinkle when he's on a smirking, swaggering roll. But he shouts all too frequently, and loses his comic edge. The Liquidator so enjoys being bad and is so effortlessly slimy that he doesn't need volume to land his punches.
In Kate, Garfinkle meets his equal in smarts and chutzpah. Marianna Bassham uses her lanky frame to full advantage. She's a catlike Kate whose withering looks and hissing putdowns turn Garfinkle into a panting puppy. This pair's scenes together are by far the most effective and entertaining in the play, overcoming the script's clich?s and setting up the surprise ending. Two local actors, Manfred J. Melcher and Jean Devereux Koester, round out the cast as two of the imperiled company's dedicated but anxious senior employees.
Idiot Brother, Idiot Lover
If Other People's Money has an old-fashioned (if PG-rated) script, Dov and Ali's is too literary, despite its gut-level emotions. It's a play of ideas in which the characters are not so much people as conflicting positions. But that's largely overcome by Michelle Tattenbaum's sharp direction of her four performers, who manage to create human characters out of the playwright's often clunky rhetoric.
Dov (Benjamin Pelteson) is a high school English teacher whose brightest student, Ali (Manish Dayal), challenges him incessantly, even rudely, first on the meaning of the book they're studying, Lord of the Flies, then on more personal issues. They come from different worlds, one the son of an Orthodox rabbi, the other a devout Muslim from an immigrant Pakistani family. But they have one thing in common: both are shackled to their fathers' traditions and expectations.
Where Dov encourages his students to investigate possible interpretations in literature, Ali insists on the right answer because his beliefs require a commitment to immutable truth. Dov, on the other hand, is fundamentally indecisive. He can't finish his Ph.D., wears his yarmulke irregularly, and is not at all sure he wants to marry his longtime girlfriend, Sonya (Heddy Lahmann, another lanky beauty who brings fire and smarts to her role). Sonya is a blonde shiksa who loves Dov deeply but would not be welcome at his father's Passover table. The question for me wasn't so much why Dov would be idiot enough not to want her, but why she would invest so much in such a nebbish.
There's a woman in Ali's life, too—his sister, Sameh (Lipica Shah, whose passion is cooler but no less intense). She is the play's narrator and a kind of ghostly presence for much of the piece, observing and commenting on her "idiot brother." She's a traditional girl with dangerously modern ideas, someone with a foot in both worlds who feels she's "a character in someone else's story." She wears a hijab, the traditional head scarf, but falls in love with Mohammad, a boy who calls himself Mo and questions the Qur'an's infallibility.
Both women prod the men to think and act for themselves, and it's they who ultimately take action. Sameh pays a severe price for flouting tradition, and Sonya despairs of making Dov commit to her. The playwright is a woman, Anna Ziegler, and even though the men have the title roles, we see them through the women's eyes.
Pelteson and Dayal are convincing and sympathetic in their respectively conflicted roles, but it's the women who move the play, even if its ultimate message is an overly simplistic plea to think for yourself. Lord of the Flies explores power and obedience in a brave new world where the rules are no longer fixed. Dov and Ali are lost on that desert island, and their twin dilemmas are nicely reflected in Sean A. Cote's set—a single platform shared by disparate worlds, framed by skeletal walls and backed by distant mountains sketched onto a concrete wall.
Other People's Money: through July 12, New Century Theatre, Mendenhall Center, Smith College, Northampton, (413) 585-3220, www.newcenturytheatre.org.
Dov and Ali: through July 12, Chester Theatre Company, 15 Middlefield Rd., Chester, (413) 354-7771, www.chestertheatre.org.
