Big Money: What Will You Do to Get It?
A fast-paced Hollywood Fringe Festival comedy takes a hard look at America’s fascination with guns.
It’s late Thursday night when the biggest assignment of your young advertising career comes down the pike: Get more moms to buy more guns. But the only moms you know are your own and guns are an alien concept for them and for you. And if you don’t succeed, you’ll be out on your ear.
Such is the challenge facing the four ambitious women at the center of “Big Money,” which opened this past weekend as part of the annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.
Written by Lauren Ferebee and directed by George Bamber, “Big Money” asks how much these women will give up—of friendships, romances, values, their health—to hit it big in the Big Apple. Will they hold their noses to peddle something they detest? Will they step over each other to get the big promotion? Will they even make it through this long night without killing each other?
Ferebee, Bamber, and fellow producer Libby Jasper discussed with us how important it was to keep the witty, fast-paced dialogue from overwhelming the play’s core examination of America’s tragic love affair with guns and the horrors that fascination so often produces.
Ferebee says her writing technique is to build a fast-moving train that smashes into the wall at the end. “So as a director, I just relied on that score,” Bamber told us. “Let’s just go fast. Let the comedy be smooth—the sugar that goes with the medicine—and let it crash at the end so the audience can pick up the pieces.”
Most impressive is the way the four women banter among themselves just the way you imagine four young women looking to make it in New York City might do—that is when they’re not being mansplained by their even younger coked-out boss who arrives just in time to take all the credit.
The cast features Milan Anderson, Anna Ming Bostwick-Winger, Dani Bryan, Olaf Eide, Libby Jasper, and Talon Warburton.
The Actors’ Company, 916A N. Formosa Avenue, Los Angeles 90046. Friday, June 9, 9 p.m.; Saturday June 11, 6:30 p.m.; Saturday, June 17, 10:30 p.m.; Saturday, June 24, 6 p.m. Tickets here.
