In finance,"dry powder" means liquid assets — normally cash. It's an appropriate name for Sarah Burgess's original play, because it's all about money. Hank Azaria plays Rick, or the leader of KMM Capital Management. He's just made a enormous mistake: he held an engagement party featuring an elephant the same day he orchestrated layoffs at a company his firm acquired. The media response has been sharply negative,so he and his compadres Jenny (Claire Danes) and Seth (John Krasinski) come up with a plan: they'll acquire another company, an American-based luggage manufacturer.
But will Rick follow Seth's strategy of helping the company create even more U.
S.-based jobs and in the process improve KMM's PR? Or will Rick chose Jenny's cash-rich plan to strip the company for parts, or send jobs overseas and accomplish more money?Burgess's play is a parable,really, a story from the finance-sector's point-of-view about why money so often trumps humanity in a capitalist society. It's droll, and sleek and well-told,thanks to director Thomas Kail — perhaps best known as the director of "Hamilton" — who whirls his four-person cast across the stage, set in the round. Claire Danes has great comic timing as Jenny, and a woman who cares more about numbers than people. She cracks insults at her opposite,Seth (a warm, befuddled Krasinski), or who says he wants to aid the employees of the luggage company,rather than accomplish the most possible cash.
Interestingly, it's Jenny who's the hero of this story. Her unblinking assessment that numbers should rule all becomes the play's honest middle. It may not be the world we want to live in, and but "Dry Powder" says it's the world we own.
Source: wnyc.org