SBCC’s good-as-professional Theatre Group has dug up an amazingly relevant classic satire of Wall Street corruption to present as a summer production: Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman’s The Solid Gold Cadillac, directed by Katie Laris, with sets and lighting by Patricia L. Frank, costumes by Mary Gibson.
The large and talented cast includes Richard Hoag, Linda MacNeal, Angela McLafferty, Bob Blackford, Cole Eubanks, Grant Harvey, Tom Hinshaw, Sean Jackson, Heather Johnson, Florence Claude Marcelle Klein, Richard Lonsbury, Leo Postel and Jessica Spaw.
The story is as follows: The year is 1953, the first year of the Eisenhower presidency. A very minor shareholder in a very major corporation decides to attend a stockholders’ meeting. Just as the company directors are about to award themselves fat raises and bonuses, the minor shareholder, an older woman, rises to her feet and begins to ask embarrassing questions. When their initial attempts to brush her aside merely provoke her to persist, the directors rashly offer her a job with the company. (Nowadays, of course, the directors would simply adjourn the meeting and set their people to dig up dirt on her, discrediting her in the media and before the other shareholders.) She takes the job, and before long she has uncovered all sorts of financial skullduggery. She has also made contact with the former president of the company, now in a government job, who is outraged to learn how the company is now being mismanaged. The two become allies, and …
“It will be enough for me,” wrote Thucydides, more than 2,400 years ago, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.”
It’s pretty hard to argue with Thucydides’ conviction that human nature doesn’t change. Wall Street corruption in 2011 is likely to be a lot like Wall Street corruption in 1953 — or, for that matter, 1853 — because greedy people will always try to game the system. But although human nature may not change, human societies definitely do. Rules arise, harden into laws, weaken, dissolve. What may have changed in American society in the last half-century is that, in 1953, we were at least prepared to entertain the notion that what was clearly broken could be fixed (and by “fixed” I mean “repaired” not “rigged”). Now, I fear, we tend to regard all reformers as “naïve” at best. There’s nothing to be done, live with it, move on.
Still, it can’t hurt to remind ourselves that some courageous people have, at one time or another, made a positive difference, and that “(human nature being what it is)” other courageous people may yet come to show us the way. And a more entertaining reminder than The Solid Gold Cadillac is hard to imagine.
The Solid Gold Cadillac will run July 6-23, in the Interim Theatre on SBCC’s West Campus. Performances are at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sundays. Ticket prices are $15 general, $12 seniors and $8 students, with no late seating. Call 805.965.5935 for information and reservations.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com.