New Play Draws On The Great Gatsby To Explore Growing Economic Status Anxiety

The inspirations for the new off-Broadway play “Dan Cody’s Yacht” make for a creatively eclectic portfolio.

Playwright and novelist Anthony Giardina never forgot the true story in the 1990s of how Acton, an affluent town near Boston in Eastern Massachusetts, rejected a bid from Maynard, a poorer neighboring town, to merge their school districts.

Wishing to explore the impact of rising income inequality in the U.S., he revisits the story in “Dan Cody’s Yacht,” a production from non-profit playhouse Manhattan Theatre Club, which opens at New York’s City Center theater this week.

The play’s title comes from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel “The Great Gatsby,” specifically the tale within the book of how billionaire Jay Gatsby got his break when he warned wealthy copper mogul Dan Cody about an impending storm.

“The Acton-Maynard school story seemed a perfect story to explore the financial divide,” Giardina told MarketWatch. “As I was developing it, ‘The Great Gatsby,’ the great novel of aspiration, seemed metaphorically perfect to address the lens of contemporary America through Gatsby’s own story.”

In “Dan Cody’s Yacht,” directed by Doug Hughes, a Massachusetts-based teacher who is struggling to make ends meet takes up the economic inducements offered to her by a wealthy gay private equity manager who is the parent of one of her students.

The play explores the gulf in economic understanding between Wall Street and Main Street as well as in income. “I’ve heard so much about people’s fear of money,” Giardina said, “and this is present in the play; that fear and sense that people don’t want to know the complex financial terms because they scare them.”

“That’s what allows both our ignorance and the financial community to feel perhaps there isn’t a huge communal oversight to what they’re doing because people just don’t know,” Giardina said.

“Dan Cody’s Yacht,” which Giardina had fact-checked by a coterie of finance professionals, references Barron’s, the trickiness of defining hedge funds, and the merits of event-driven investing. In the play, private equity manager Kevin plays an instrumental role in derailing a school merger and is honest about what he believes it takes to get ahead in 21st Century America.

“There is this sense that what we have to do to protect our children and give them a better chance is essentially game the system,” said Giardina. “We don’t allow the system as it exists to work. We hire SAT tutors for instance – my parents never did that with me.”

He added: “We do this while feeling we are good liberal, progressive people trying to do what we can to solve the problems of inequality in this country. But at the same time we’re in a large part contributing to that inequality.”

Actress Kristen Bush, who plays teacher Cara Russo, also appeared in Giardina’s acclaimed 2014 play “The City of Conversation,” about political division in Washington D.C. in the 1980s. She hailed the writer’s lack of explicit messaging in his work.

“I don’t think he is trying to convert anyone to a specific way of thinking,” Bush told MarketWatch. “There’s no message other than we want people to think about what they’re doing and about education and the idea of class. We like to pretend there is no such thing as class difference but especially now with this insane wealth that I see more of, the issue of the Haves and Have Nots needs to be looked at.”

“Is the world we want to live in one in which a very small amount of people have so much wealth?” she added. “Is that the best that democracy can do? I don’t know the answer to that but I want people to leave talking about it.”

Giardina also spoke of his new play addressing increasing class divisions in America. “It is not enough to be solidly middle-class in this country anymore,” he said. “Once upon a time $100,000 was a terrific salary but what does it get you now? Does it allow you to pay for college? No. What kind of a house does it get you? Not a very good one.”

“Who is willing to say, ‘That’s enough. We’ll make do. My kids will go to whatever college I can afford’? Very few people are willing to say that anymore,” he said.

Giardina, who has had a four-decade career as a novelist and playwright, dates the change in economic status anxiety back to 1980s Reaganomics. “After the election of Ronald Reagan, during his first term, it was discernible that money came back to the city [New York] and things were going up for sale and changing in this realm,” he said.

“Reagan came along with a very easy answer that people cottoned on to and it was money. Track the last 40 years and I go back to that. It would behoove us all to look at the way that money and aspiration are linked when money is so consuming us now,” he said. “I wanted to look at both how much people feel part of their communities and how people think about money outside the financial community.”

Despite being a leading theater and TV actress, Kristen Bush said the play’s financial doubts spoke to her own economic experience. “If anyone were to look at my bank account, they would throw me a pity party because I haven’t made it work,” she said. “Performing this play like this feels like such a pit in my stomach because I’ve done such a terrible job of looking out for my future. But it’s very difficult to do so when you’re an artist or an actor.”

She added: “I go from paycheck to paycheck. When I’m not working as an actor I pray for residuals or for the episodic TV show where I play the murdering mother, or something like that, and you get paid a fourth of what you would usually make in an entire year in a week.”

She added: “I have to pinch myself because I’ve worked with some incredible directors and Jan Maxwell and Kevin Kline. But when it comes to the financial aspect of things, I can’t take my parents out to dinner at a nice place. They take me. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to that stage I get paid an off-Broadway salary, which is still pretty poor, I have to say.”

“I wish success wasn’t judged that way but I live in New York, the hotbed of capitalism, where money seems to be all-pervasive so there’s no other way to judge it here. But with this play I’m able to explore the issues on stage that I’m actually dealing with,” she said.

One exchange in the play particularly resonated with the actress. “There’s a scene where Cara undresses for Kevin in a sort of metaphoric sense in regards to how much she makes. I feel her embarrassment big time,” she said.

Giardina said the key to writing a play about money is to make the subject symbolic of something else. “A lot of people are writing about money and I’ve seen a bunch of plays that have addressed it. Fitzgerald understood you’ve got to find the metaphor within it and a character who embodies something.”

He added: “You can’t just write about money because it’s so easy to fall back on the cliché and to fall back on the evil of the 1% and the virtue of the 99%. That’s not true. It’s not helpful to think that way.”