With the financial meltdown aftermath, the public’s mistrust for bankers, and traders pushing the lay audience to buy stocks again, there’s hardly a better time for Righteous Money, written and performed by Michael Yates Crowley. There’s also hardly a better theater for it than 3LD, smack in the middle of the financial district, where it played on a double-bill with Gerechtes Geld, its German adaptation.
The opening instantly drops us inside the mind of a sociopathic trader. Celebrated investor CJ starts his TV show by calling himself the “hand of the market,” bragging about his penthouse from where he doesn’t hear the occupiers’ drums, and pushing his new book, Buy the Recession. He addresses his audience as toads “croaking for money,” dishes out financial advice ranging from “don’t learn from your mistakes, ignore them,” and shares memories of financial decisions based on his erectile dysfunction. He also has a history of making unwanted witnesses disappear.
“Recession was an act of God who does not exist,” he declares among other statements, adding that, “I do this show because I love you,” and “Call me a Communist, but I want every one of you to be rich.” He gets personal at times, “Dow was up yesterday, and that always makes me horny,” and shares his ultimate investment tip: “Clean yourself from all emotions and money will flow to you like water.”
But things start going awry shortly: an envelope with proof of CJ’s inside trading disappears, his assistant Nathan calls to say he won’t be in, and the show’s guest, a personal finance guru Suze, pulls a vanishing act.
“Never sleep with your assistants,” CJ dishes out extra, non-monetary, advice to his audience, but his problems don’t end there. Nathan, a poet who, in CJ’s words, writes, “how fruit is like a body and how a body is like fruit,” decides to go to war with his boss, whatever the price. “The market is telling you, your poems are bad,” CJ says, but he underestimates his assistant.
A lot goes on in this controversial and at times rage-invoking play—sex and stocks, lust and love, inside trading and blackmail, and, depending on the play’s version and your imagination, epiphany, murder or both. Based on the same script with the same sociopathic jokes, the original play and its German variation are very different. Righteous Money gets an infusion of sentimentality, Gerechtes Geld swells of insanity. Righteous Money spills coffee, Gerechtes Geld draws blood. American CJ exudes dumb arrogance while his German twin, played by Matthias Hebe, oozes blood-curling viciousness. CJ the Yankee could use a shot of savagery while the German financier is chillingly charismatic and frighteningly believable. We can’t help but wonder: How true is this depiction of the ill-famous one percent?
If you missed the double-bill, you can catch Righteous Money in its solo production at the Red Room later this week. It leaves Wall Street, but its scornful take on greed, lust and how far one can righteously go for money, will remain.
Wolf 359 Presents
Righteous Money
85 East 4th Street
