“To see what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Dorothy Parker’s telling line came back to me as I sat through Two Fisted Love, David Sessions’s dark drama, now in a world-premiere run at the Odyssey and directed by Jules Aaron. In the play we meet a bunch of one-percenters residing in the Silicon Valley in the year 2008. If you remember, that’s when capitalism went into free-fall, with Lehman Brothers and other major financial institutions and banks going bust after having ripped off the nation with a slew of bogus investment packages. Mirroring that collapse is the one taking place in the living room of Caroline Connors (Serena Scott Thomas) and Kevin Singleton (David Sessions, the playwright). A couple right out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, they spend most of their time getting drunk and insulting each other in vituperative fashion. Money is at the heart of their quarrels. Caroline can’t understand why Kevin just spent several million dollars on a Jasper Johns’ painting of an American flag. She also disapproves when he decides to buy their son Justin (Jacob Osborne) a ninety-thousand dollar Tesla speedster, all because he got into Stanford. The other super-rich folk who turn up in the Atherton household are Maggie Navarro (Lynne Oropeza), the shopaholic wife of Robert Navarro (Rene Rivera), head of a tennis-shoe company, and Andy Wainwright (Jason Downs), Kevin’s business partner. The other characters in the nine-person cast include Maria (Paula Lafayette), a beautiful young Guatemalan housekeeper; Rachel (Laura Long), Caroline’s teenaged daughter by her first, late husband. Rounding out the list is Dr. Ryan (Robert Bella), who is treating Caroline for multiple sclerosis, a disease that will slowly debilitate her during the course of the story. And what a bleak, bitter story it is for all concerned. Kevin, a cold fish who is as arrogant as he is obnoxious, will defend his love of money even as news of the Wall Street crash plays on his TV. His greed-is-good philosophy enrages Rachel, who, with her wildly colored hair and bizarre, blinged-out attire, is trying to rebel against her upbringing. Bratty and brash, she challenges the morality not only of her step-father but of his buddy Robert, who charges thousands of dollars for his sneakers while paying his Third World workers a buck-fifty a day. Robert’s defense? “That’s the way things are.” Even less caring is Andy, a crude, horny, rapacious Brit who is contemptuous of the poor—except for the young girls he sleeps with on sex trips to Thailand. Thoughts of what he did to them give him guilty nightmares. The only working-class—and sympathetic-- person in sight is the sweet-natured Maria, who of course is seduced by Kevin. After knocking her up, he gets rid of that “little problem” by shipping her back to Guatemala. The playwright Sessions attacks the amorality of the age in head-on fashion in Two Fisted Love. He has a lot to say about the death of the American Dream (symbolized by the ever-present Jasper Johns painting), but undermines that with his melodramatic plotting—especially, a less-than-believable murder. He also fails badly in making us care about any of his characters. On the plus side, though, are the strong performances by the cast and the fine production values, starting with John Iacovelli’s elegant set. Jules Aaron, who took hold of the directorial reins late in the game, has done his usual good job.
