Commitment and Capitalism : Director-actor Kevin Conway finds new layers in Jerry Sterner’s acidic comedy ‘Other People’s Money’

Kevin Conway scans around his domain, and if he is concerned, he doesn’t show it. The first real rainstorm to douse Los Angeles in far too long wasn’t merely hitting the roof of the venerable but aging Pasadena Playhouse--it was coming straight through the ceiling and dripping on the rehearsal room floor. Large bowls and pans are vainly trying to catch the drips; a chorus of loud “plops” fill the room, making it difficult to hear. If the rain turns into a torrent, the place where Conway is preparing his staging of Jerry Sterner’s acidic comedy, “Other People’s Money” (opening tonight at the Playhouse) might literally be a wash.

“This is a great old place, isn’t it?” Conway asks, with an optimistic edge.

He needs all the positive energy he can get. Conway is known as an actor, like George C. Scott, who doesn’t so much build a performance as fuel it: He won the Obie for “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?,” originated the Broadway role of Dr. Treves in “The Elephant Man” and was a legendary McMurphy in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Now, after nearly two years off-Broadway (as actor) and in Chicago (as director) dealing with Sterner’s brilliant, devious takeover artist, Lawrence Garfinkle (dubbed “Larry the Liquidator”), he has brought both actor’s and director’s hats to Pasadena. Sterner likens what Conway is doing to being a player-coach.

But how about being on two teams at once? While Conway is rehearsing in Los Angeles, he is commuting to San Francisco and the Marines Memorial Theatre to put up another edition of “Other People’s Money”--the one he directed at Chicago’s Royal George Theatre. Even for a fairly optimistic guy, isn’t this just a little much?

“It’s going to be a pretty exciting couple of weeks, that’s for sure,” he says, seated at a rehearsal room table while the rain plonks in the background. The crazed schedule wasn’t Conway’s idea. Rather, the Chicago producers informed him in mid-February of their San Francisco plans.

That’s the way it’s been for Sterner’s play, which is a very hot commodity right now. There is the upcoming Norman Jewison film version starring Danny DeVito (adapted from the play without Sterner’s involvement). Then, there are the various stagings, from Minneapolis and Albany to the just-closed San Diego Old Globe production.

Conway, though, is in a unique position vis-a-vis “Other People’s Money,” not only because he is actor-director, not only because of his long involvement with the play, but because of the way--as Sterner describes it--he reconceived the role of Garfinkle.

Sterner’s play is about the hard rain that fell on America’s industrial backbone during the 1980s, when buyouts and junk bonds replaced factory production as the grease of the country’s economic machine. Garfinkle spots a cash-rich, but weak outfit, New England Wire and Cable, as a prime target for his takeover schemes. First, though, he must contend with the old-fashioned owner (played by veteran stage and film actor John Anderson), his loyal aide (Georgeann Johnson) and her conniving lawyer daughter, Kate (Acting Company alum Margaret Reed).

During auditions for the world premiere at New Jersey’s American Stage Company, among the many actors Sterner saw for Garfinkle was Conway. As the playwright recalls, “I wrote this character who was a 300-pound Jewish guy from the Bronx, and in comes this 160-pound Irishman (Conway), and I thought, ‘No way!’ I had a young Zero Mostel in mind.”

Conway didn’t get the part. (It went to David Schramm, who, ironically, is beginning rehearsals of his upcoming production of Ronald Ribman’s “Rug Merchants of Chaos” at the playhouse’s Balcony Theatre.)

Then, in late 1988, with hit runs at American Stage and Hartford Stage setting up an Off-Broadway opening for “Other People’s Money,” Conway received a call from his agent.

“I had just finished filming an episode of ‘In the Heat of the Night’ down South. I had run myself ragged, and the last thing I needed was this voice on the other end of the line asking me to come New York to read for a director. ‘What was the play?,’ I asked. When I heard that it was ‘Other People’s Money,’ it set me back. I get suspicious when something goes away, then comes back later.”

Conway went, but Sterner still didn’t quite buy him in the role. “That was before I saw what he did with it,” Sterner said in a phone interview. “In truth, Kevin taught me about Garfinkle. He’s shown me depths and layers to him I never imagined. I hadn’t allowed for his power as an actor.”

The actor’s idea was to radically take the role in two--seemingly opposite--directions. One way was to play up the serious underbelly of the portly arbitrager, deliberately turning sure-fire laugh lines into moments of reflection.

The other direction was to heighten the play’s moments when characters directly address the audience, “when Garfinkle literally does stand-up,” in Conway’s words. Some New York critics equated this with Jackie Mason, some going as far to suggest that Conway’s Garfinkle nearly amounted to an ethnic slur. (The movie version changes his name to Garfield).

But Conway emphatically denies the substance of any “controversy” around his performance. “I’ve never seen Jackie Mason’s act, and I didn’t even think of him while creating the role. In 16 months in New York, I got only one letter, from a rabbi, concerned about the image Garfinkle conveyed, and I discussed this with him.

“It’s very important that he be Jewish: He’s proud to be a Jewish New Yorker, just as much as he’s proud of his capitalist code of honor. He’s built up these layers of fat--ingesting doughnuts, smoking like crazy--as callouses against past hurts. I’m sure he was a victim of anti-Semitism, and making money is his best revenge.”

Though Garfinkle was obviously inspired by the legions of corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and Ivan Boesky, he is not, for Conway, an evil man. “That is too simple, and it misses the reasons why he’s so good at what he does. He’s stretching the envelope of the capitalist system, but nothing he does is illegal.

When Kate tempts him with greenmail, the way Trump and others operate, he rejects it as unethical.

“He’s greedy and nasty, but he has nobility, and Kate sees that. What’s crucial is that we see the rapport between Kate and him. He starts by being a clown, and then gets serious. And so goes the play.”

As director, Conway is conscious of how his cast is just beginning to grasp the nature of Sterner’s verbal volleyball match. “This is really a fight over values, and the play has to work at breakneck speed. But at this stage in rehearsals, the cast isn’t aware of how raucous the show can be.”

As Conway goes through the final scenes with his company, the emphasis is on blocking, not pace. With actress Reed, he sets up the scene as if it were a camera shot--a betrayal of Conway’s other life as a filmmaker. While seeking a distributor for a feature already under his belt--a drama about New York Puerto Ricans called “The Sun and the Moon”--he is adapting Ted Whitehead’s play, “Mecca,” for the screen.

It was “Mecca,” in fact, that marked the start of Conway’s directing career. “I had seen other actors go into directing, which I felt was a bad move. ‘You’re in the world’s greatest profession,’ I’d tell them. ‘Don’t try to become a control freak.’ But inexorably, I also fell into directing.”

Born in Harlem during World War II and raised in Queens, Conway came late to acting (“I didn’t see a stage play until I was 23”) after working as an IBM sales analyst. Studying acting “as a lark,” he eventually asked IBM to fire him--so he could collect unemployment--in order to take on the profession full-time. After dry gulches of joblessness, he went on the road in “The Impossible Years” with actor Tom Ewell. “He put everything he had into the show, and this had a profound effect on me. Acting made no sense without total commitment.”

Eventually, Conway had a profound effect on others. He co-starred with James Woods, under Alan Schneider’s direction, in Edmund Bond’s “Saved.” He covered the American regional theater map, which led to films (“Slaughterhouse 5”), which led to “Red Ryder” (his last Los Angeles stage appearance, in 1975), “Cuckoo’s Nest,” and “Of Mice and Men” on Broadway with James Earl Jones.

All long runs, which sometimes became long in the tooth. “I saw how plays could become flabby with time and without a director keeping tabs. That’s when directing became important to me.”

But now that he’s in the middle of his “exciting weeks” as a theatrical player-coach, he may find it hard to put aside Sterner’s concerns that “the director in him might neglect the actor in him.”

“Nah,” Conway says simply. Maybe his optimism has something to it after all: the rain has stopped outside, and the rehearsal room is no longer leaking.