Dry Powder

Here's what I liked about Dry Power, Sarah Burgess's predictable, unimaginative, and lame incitement of high finance, currently playing at the Public Theater: the women in the crew wore black cocktail dresses when they moved the (unimpressive, ugly) scenery.

Azaria, Danes, Krasinski
Photo: Joan Marcus

To call Dry Powder one-dimensional would be to compliment it. Jenny (Claire Danes) and Seth (John Krasinski) each want their boss Rick (Hank Azaria) to choose their ideas; they compete, nastily, on both a professional and personal level. They are all three bottom-line people, except that Seth has a conscience and wants to do something good. It's not clear if Seth always had a conscience (in which case how did he get where he is?) or just grew one (in which case it would be nice to know how and why). But ultimately it doesn't matter; little he says sounds like a real person speaking. Jenny has no conscience, no heart, no morals; she is a human made of numbers and dollar signs. Nothing she says sounds like a real person speaking.