You Might Recognize The Main Character

In 1989 former businessman turned playwright Jerry Sterner penned a huge hit about a rapacious corporate takeover specialist, Larry ​“The Liquidator” Garfinkle, a fast-talking, donut-and-bagel-eating New Yorker who takes over the New England Wire and Cable Company. Popular among Wall Streeters, It even earned the endorsement of a rising young real estate mogul named Donald Trump, although he invested no money — not even other people’s money — in the production.

That play, felicitously named Other People’s Money, is being revived at Long Wharf Theatre in an era and at a moment when artistic director Gordon Edelstein, who chose the play, and its young director Marc Bruni both feel it will ring a contemporary bell, and a whole lot more.

“With people struggling and industries leaving, it feels like a fertile time to revisit this story,” Bruni said at the beginning of the second week of rehearsal for the play, which will open on Wednesday, Nov. 23 and run through Dec. 18.

Bruni, whose background is largely in musicals and whose debut as a director has been a great hit for Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, said that there are no plans to update the play, which is set in the downsizing and corporate raiding 1980s.

“We’re not taking it out of the 1980s, yet Garfinkle’s chatter is very reminiscent of Donald Trump,” said Bruni.

He was referring to far more than several references in the rapid-fire persiflage to ​“other people’s money,” or OPM, a term we have heard a lot about in the agonizingly long presidential election campaign.

Take, by way of example, a moment before the ultimate showdown, when shareholders have to vote for Larry, whose takeover will mean more bucks in their pocket, or Jorgenson, the president who wants to be decent to the workers as well.

Larry corners Kate — the lawyer who has been threatening to use an arsenal of anti-takeover tactics to stave off Larry’s bid — and says to her: ​“What makes the two of us so special, what sets us apart is we care more about the game than the players. That’s not bad. That’s smart.”

Just like paying no taxes is so smart.

“The parallels are obvious and many,” Bruni suggested, including several long spiels by Larry about the uses of women and the condition of his you-know-what.

And then there’s the adoration that The Liquidator seems to be seeking through his takeovers and his accumulation of power and moolah.

To Bea, Kate’s mother and a loyal employee who cares about the company, he says: ​“I love money more than the things it can buy. And I love the things it can buy. You know why? Money is unconditional acceptance. It don’t care whether I’m good or not, whether I snore or don’t, which God I pray to — it makes me as much interest in the bank as yours does. There’s only three things in this world that give that kind of unconditional acceptance —dogs, donuts and money. Only money is better. It don’t make you fat and it don’t shit all over the living room floor.”

Bruni said he was drawn to the project in part because of the musicality of this kind of patter. He said audiences can expect a kind of ​“propulsive storytelling” where ​“you get on the ride, and it takes you through.”

Unlike certain politicians to whom Larry may be compared, however, Bruni said he sees in Garfinkle and the other characters people who very much mean what they say, regardless of whether or not it comes out foul-mouthed.

And meaning what you say is absolutely essential, especially in the many musicals Bruni has been involved in. In musicals, your character must mean what he or she is saying in order to be believed when they break into song, he said.

In Bruni’s reading, Garfinkle also has a kind of moral center, at least about money: ​“Taking from the rich and giving it to the upper middle class, and not taking money from widows and orphans.”

But that moral center is all about the embrace of capitalism — a system that destroys one company in the process of creating something else. It creates a world of winners and losers.

Sound familiar?

One aspect of Larry Garfinkle that at least this reader of the script came away with as very troubling: Larry, as written by Sterner, can seem close to a kind of anti-Semitic stereotype. (It’s revealing that in the movie version of the play, Danny DeVito plays Larry and the name is switched from Garfinkle to Garfield).

To that concern Bruni replied that Long Wharf’s rendition is going to be true to the script and the ​“musicality” of Garfinkle, including the uptick in the voice at the end of the line.

However, he added that the aim, as always, is to get away from what he called ​“the Shylock problem” by portraying real people. Garfinkle is not only a truth-teller — tough as some of that truth may be to hear — but also someone who has in his heart a ​“reverence for the purity of money and its pursuit.”

He praised Lage, the actor playing Garfinkle (who is a founding member of the New York-based Atlantic Theater Company) as exceptionally talented and said, ​“in our production he has great charm.”

And, Bruni added, ​“We’re not giving him a bad comb-over.”