Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

238 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, a savage, satirical comedy about international finance—partly in verse and occasionally
in song—had a well-received revival at New York’s Atlantic Stage 2 in 2012. Here Jeanne LaSala Taylor plays Jacinta
Condor, a sultry Peruvian drug trafficker, surrounded by David Barlow as an ultra-greedy financier (left) and Alex Draper
as his British counterpart. Cheryl Faraone was the director. © Ruby Washington/The New York Times/Redux
playful or whimsical tone renders even the harshest criticism
palatable—and, in exceptionally dangerous times,
may also protect a playwright from political retribution.
We use the term satire to distinguish such works, which
have been popular in the theatre of most cultures.
British playwright Caryl Churchill (born 1938) has
been a unique exemplar of socially conscious dramatic satire
since the 1970s, with trenchant and brilliantly innovative
works on a wide variety of issues: sexual orientations
and their attendant prejudices and hypocrisies (Cloud 9),
gender discrimination throughout history (Top Girls), the
post–cold war chaos in eastern Europe (Mad Forest), and
the literal, apocalyptic end of the world (Far Away). In
each of these works, Churchill has reinvestigated—and in
some cases reinvented—the dramaturgical format itself.
In Cloud 9, for example, she double-casts actors in both
male and female—and youthful and elderly—roles, putting
a wholly new slant on the complex perspectives
gender and age cast on our notions of personal identity.
And in all of her plays, Churchill reexamines the syntax
of stage dialogue, often creating new conversational
punctuation systems to identify just how characters—like
people in real life—frequently overlap, interrupt, and
abort their own and each other’s speeches.
In Serious Money (1987), Churchill employs a racy
rhyming verse—in an exceptional glib patter that lies
somewhere between e. e. cummings and hip-hop—to
explore the vagaries of arbitrage stock trading on the
London market and of international finance:
ZACKERMAN[an international banker in London]:
There’s some enterprising guys around and here’s
an example.
You know how if you want to get a job in the states
you have to give a urine sample?
(This is to show you’re not on drugs.)
There’s a company now for a fifty dollar fee