Charles
Isherwood

March 22, 2016

Calling all Bernie Sanders fans. There’s a pageant of red meat for you onstage at the Public Theater, where Sarah Burgess’s “Dry Powder,” about rapacious wheeling and dealing in the world of high finance, opened on Tuesday night. Take your forks and knives — and heck, your pitchforks, too — and dig in! As befits a slick drama set in sleek boardrooms — or, more likely, as befits a play addressing the hot-button topics of income inequality and the collapse of American manufacturing — the production has attracted a first-class cast and creative team. Claire Danes, the “Homeland” stalwart, and John Krasinski, the sexy-goofy star of “The Office,” play founding partners in a private equity firm. Hank Azaria is the company’s president. The production’s director is Thomas Kail, riding high on the smash success of “Hamilton.” As the play opens, Mr. Azaria’s Rick is in a foul mood. He’s been fending off anxious calls from investors who have been targeted by protesters after Rick gave himself a lavish engagement party (the elephant was definitely a bad idea) at the same time the company was announcing layoffs at a grocery store chain it had bought. This doesn’t faze Ms. Danes’s Jenny, whose immersion in her job and the world of the 1-percenters she inhabits is pretty much total. When told of the angry mobs descending upon the firm’s investors, Jenny scoffs: “Of course they’re protesting. That’s what unemployed people do.”