Play: Old Money

Overview
Wendy Wasserstein's Old Money stages a witty, incisive meditation on class, inheritance, and the rituals that sustain privilege. The play sets two affluent families in the same luxurious Manhattan town house at different historical moments, allowing their lives to resonate across time. Through parallel scenes and repeated motifs, the play examines how wealth shapes desire, identity, and moral imagination.

Structure and Staging
The drama relies on juxtaposition rather than a linear narrative: a Gilded Age household and a contemporary one occupy the same physical space, their routines and anxieties refracting one another. Scenes slide between eras, and echoes of language and behavior create a sense of continuity that makes the house itself a character. The staging invites comparisons rather than direct interaction, so contrasts of costume, manners, and priorities generate much of the play's energy.

Plot Sketch
At the heart of Old Money are domestic conflicts that reveal larger social patterns: marriage, social standing, and the management of inheritances are enacted as performances. The older family embodies the strict codes and conspicuous consumption of late 19th-century society, with rituals that both affirm status and limit emotional freedom. The modern family navigates the anxieties of maintaining that status in a landscape of changing values, public scrutiny, and consumerist reinvention. Episodes of social maneuvering, private confessions, and moments of comic embarrassment expose the human costs of sustained affluence.

Themes and Tone
The title's pun , between inherited "old money" and the emotional costs of long-established wealth , signals the play's central concerns. Wasserstein mines satire and sympathy in equal measure, skewering the absurdities of social climbing while retaining a humane eye for loneliness and longing. Wealth emerges as both armor and prison: it allows characters to shape the world, yet it often prevents them from seeing themselves honestly. Questions of obligation, charity, and personal fulfillment recur, with philanthropy depicted at times as genuine conscience and at others as a performative ritual that consolidates status.

Women, Identity, and Social Expectation
A consistent thread is the gendered nature of privilege. Women in both eras must perform roles shaped by family expectations and public reputation, and Wasserstein interrogates how those roles are both oppressive and strategically navigable. The play gives particular attention to the ways women negotiate agency: some accept the script of social decorum, others quietly subvert it, and still others attempt to rewrite the rules through career, marriage, or social influence. Those negotiations reveal how class and gender intertwine to define what success and selfhood look like.

Style and Voice
Wasserstein's language combines sharp comedic timing with moments of reflective melancholy. Dialogue often crackles with irony and social observation, but scenes frequently open onto deeper vulnerabilities that complicate simple satire. The play's rhythm depends on contrasts , between polished conversation and private confession, between ritualistic formality and unguarded feeling , which keeps the audience attentive to both wit and weight.

Legacy and Resonance
Old Money offers a timely exploration of the persistence of class codes in American life, asking whether inherited privilege can ever be fully transcended. By locating similar anxieties in two eras, the play suggests that social change alters appearances more than the underlying dilemmas of power and belonging. Its blend of comedy and moral inquiry makes it a telling commentary on how wealth shapes not only opportunity but imagination.