Old Money: A Play

By Wendy Wasserstein

A dinner party in an ornate mansion on the fashionable Upper East Side of Manhattan provides the scene for this witty and incisive play. Set in two eras--the early 1900s and our own Gilded Age--the characters move effortlessly from one period to the other. The host, a contemporary master of high-risk arbitrage, steps in and out of character as a robber baron of an earlier time. His guests of today include a Hollywood director, a not-so-cutting-edge sculptor, an online lingerie designer, an aggressive publicist, and an aging historian. Their counterparts from the past are the great man's rebellious son, a grand dame of New York society, the architect who built the mansion originally, and the maids and servants who maintain it. In this dance of rich storytelling and social commentary, it becomes strikingly clear that while old money has become new, little else has changed over the years. Children still rebel against their controlling parents, women still hope for love, and greed, snobbery, and angst persist.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0573627932
• ISBN13: 9780573627934
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Samuel French
• Length: 74 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An extraordinary and very moving play

This heartfelt and moving play shifts back and forth in time but maintains a single setting: the living room of a Manhattan mansion. The two contrasting timeframes are used to explicate Wasserstein's themes or art vs.commerce, of love and loss. This is a thoughtful and beautiful work, and I can't recommend it highly enough.This play should be read by anyone with an interest in American drama.