Empathy Is For Pussies

Schadenfreude often arrives in strange packaging. For some, it was the recent news that Scott Pruitt was finally forced out of his job as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. For others, it was learning that Sarah Huckabee Sanders had been asked to leave the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, Virginia. Overnight sensations like "Permit Patty" and "Barbecue Becky" have discovered there is a social cost to becoming a viral celebrity while others, such as Adam Bloom of the Glenridge Homeowners Association in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, have lost their jobs because employers do not wish to be associated with their racist behavior.

The news that Paul Manafort has gone from the lap of luxury to home arrest to spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement has delivered a happy helping of schadenfreude to myself and many others who are appalled by the change in America's morals since Donald Trump took office. Unfortunately, with snide, sniveling, and sadistic cretins like Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions inflicting crimes against humanity on immigrants approaching our nation's southern border in search of political asylum, the sad fact is that the United States government has strayed far and wide from our nation's widely cherished ideals.

Just as the difference between President Barack Obama and Donald Trump is as obvious as the difference between black and white, so is the change in our nation's leadership from a focus on the common good to a disturbingly toxic and vindictive lack of empathy. More than 64 years have passed since June 9, 1954, when Joseph Welch asked Senator Joseph McCarthy: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

Although this year's separation of immigrant children from their parents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel has been met with repeated outcries from mental health professionals about the psychological damage being needlessly inflicted on these children, it's difficult for many people to imagine the life-long effect such emotional trauma can have on a person's life. Two new films examine the topic from a unique historical perspective by documenting the tragic side effects of an incompetent study performed in the 1960s by a prestigious adoption agency based in New York City.

One of these films (currently enjoying a theatrical release) tells how identical triplets Eddy Galland, David Kellman, and Bobby Shafran were separated at birth and reunited at the age of 19 by a stroke of good luck.


The other is a disturbing documentary by Lori Shinseki entitled The Twinning Reaction, in which the above-mentioned triplets are only one set of infants whose lives were harmed by the callous disregard of two psychoanalysts (Peter Neubauer and Viola Bernard) who never got any kind of informed consent before using identical twins as human guinea pigs.

The three sets of identical twins and the triplets who are the subjects of The Twinning Reaction were separated by the Louise Wise Services adoption agency in the 1960s. Later in life, at least three of the adult individuals (whose adoptive parents were never told that their child had an “other”) committed suicide. Their survivors have struggled to gain access to sealed research data that could give them invaluable information about their lives. According to the filmmaker:

• The two psychoanalysts separated at least five sets of twins and triplets.
• Researchers tested, filmed, and interviewed some of the children and their families for years under the pretense of conducting an “adoption study” although their clinical efforts were to gain data for a “nature versus nurture” study of identical twins (and triplets) separated in infancy.
• A common theme among all of the identical twins is the enduring pain surrounding their childhood separations. Many exhibited troubling behavior as children (head-banging, rocking, holding their breath until they passed out) as well as profound sadness.
• Some of the twins and triplets were reunited by sheer luck, others through the filmmaker’s years of research on this story.
• With the help of their attorneys, identical twins Doug Rausch and Howard Burack managed to obtain access their own secret study files (which were originally to remain sealed at the Yale University Archives until the year 2066 when, if they even lived that long, the twins would be 103 years old).

While The Twinning Reaction primarily focuses on Rausch and Burack, interviews with other survivors and some of the remaining adoptive parents reveal a great deal of anguish and despair caused by the adoption agency's forced separation of the infants for research purposes. In light of the crisis triggered by the Trump administration's immigration policies, Shinseki's disturbing documentary offers glaring proof of the damage done when innocent children are treated only as statistics, used as hostages or political pawns for the purpose of negotiation, or their suffering is considered merely as "collateral damage." Here's the trailer:

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Over in Berkeley, the Aurora Theatre Company is presenting the Bay area premiere of a tense financial thriller by Sarah Burgess entitled Dry Powder. Those who remember films like 1987's Wall Street, 1991's Other People's Money and 2012's The Queen of Versailles (or had the privilege of attending performances of Lucy Prebble's 2009 romp entitled Enron: The Musical, Bennett Fisher's 2011 financial farce entitled Hermes, and Ayad Akhtar's 2012 financial thriller, The Invisible Hand) know that greed and chicanery play strong roles in building dramatic tension during financial negotiations. Back in 2012, when Mitt Romney was running for President, tales of how mercenary vulture capital firms like Bain Capital would acquire a distressed company, strip it of its assets and leave most of its employees high and dry were a polite prelude to Jed Rothstein's chilling new documentary entitled The China Hu$tle.


Dry Powder revolves around three fast-talking financiers trying to close a deal under the pressures of Wall Street and the recent glare of a decidedly unfavorable media spotlight.

Rick (Aldo Billingslea) is the CEO of KMM Capital Management, a highly successful private equity firm currently making the wrong kind of headlines. His over-the-top engagement party (which included a live elephant) was held at the same time that a supermarket chain KMM had invested in announced substantial layoffs, generating angry protests that have spooked KMM's limited partners.

Jenny (Emily Jeanne Brown) is Rick's hard-as-nails numbers person, a soulless young woman who prefers large short-term profits to small payoffs from long-term "feel-good" investments. A rabid control freak who moves around New York in town cars and refuses to step foot in a taxi, Jenny disproves the myth that women are too emotional to make good decisions. If anything, she's like what would happen if someone implanted an artificial intelligence robot inside a great white shark.

Jenny (Emily Jeanne Brown) is a cutthroat numbers-driven
financial analyst in Dry Powder (Photo by: David Allen)

Seth (Jeremy Kahn) is Jenny's male counterpart, a man who prefers to take an old-fashioned networking approach to finding potential investment projects. His current target is Landmark Luggage, a closely-held, family-owned business with a solid reputation for designing and manufacturing its products in America. Landmark's aging founder is no longer very active in the business, but would like to find a buyer who would keep the company based in Sacramento while retaining its large payroll of extremely loyal employees (many have been with the company for decades).

Jeremy Kahn (Seth) and Kevin Kemp (Jeff) in a
scene from Dry Powder (Photo by: David Allen)

Jeff (Kevin Kemp) is the current CEO of Landmark Luggage, an affable man who has put a lot of time and energy into running Landmark while developing a close friendship with Seth.


As the play begins, Rick is grilling Jenny about her upcoming appearance before a group of finance students at NYU and realizing that she has absolutely no understanding of the public relations disaster her speech could trigger in the media. Eager to tamp down the recent hostile media reaction to his engagement party, he is weighing whether to pursue a deal with Landmark Luggage before asking Jeff to sign a Letter of Intent. Unfortunately, not everyone is on the same page.

• Seth (who has managed to get Landmark's price down to $491 million) wants to transform the company into an online business that offers custom-made luggage while keeping its corporate headquarters in Sacramento and "doing the right thing" for its employees. Having invested a lot of energy into bonding with Jeff, he's convinced that Landmark could appeal to the tired traveling executive who craves instant gratification while shopping online at night in a hotel room far from home.
• Jenny would prefer to liquidate Landmark by stripping the company of its assets, laying off all but three key employees, and relocating the production line to Bangladesh. Her goal is to expand the firm's market reach by aiming its product line at China's rapidly expanding upper middle class (which is predicted to experience astonishing growth).
• Jeff would secretly like to hire Seth away from KMM, move him to Sacramento, and let him apply his impressive business skills to taking Landmark to the next level.
• Rick is eager to find a solution which gives him good press, even if it involves offshoring Landmark's manufacturing to Mexico. Unfortunately, many of KMM's limited partners have just bailed on him, forcing Rick to consider replacing their investment capital with money from a Chinese mobster based in Hong Kong.

Rick (Aldo Billingslea), Jenny (Emily Jeanne Brown),
Jeff (Kevin Kemp), and Seth (Jeremy Kahn) in a
scene from Dry Powder (Photo by: David Allen)

In his program note, dramaturg Josh Costello writes:

"The Stephen A. Schwarzmans of the world seem to live in a different universe from the one most of us inhabit. The impenetrable jargon, the incredibly complex financial instruments, the lavish lifestyles, and the staggering amounts of money being moved around all serve to emphasize the distance between Wall Street and the rest of us. But we’ve learned -- hopefully -- that the economy connects everybody, and that the behavior of financial firms has real consequences for us all."

Rick (Aldo Billingslea) is the head of a private equity
firm in Dry Powder (Photo by: David Allen)

"Those consequences can range from the near-collapse of the entire economy (forcing nine million families out of their homes due to foreclosures from 2006 to 2014) to round after round of layoffs when piratical private equity firms buy up companies only to squeeze out every last drip of profit by selling off assets and slashing jobs. To make matters worse, the people responsible for all this suffering rarely have to face any consequences themselves. They’re protected -- sometimes by government bailouts and sometimes because human suffering is seen as insignificant collateral damage in the eternal quest for profits."

Emily Jeanne Brown (Jenny) and Jeremy Kahn (Seth)
in a scene from Dry Powder (Photo by: David Allen)

Burgess's script presents a stiff challenge for the three KMM executives, who must be able to spit out a shitload of industry jargon without tripping over their words. Working on Tanya Orellana's sleek, stark unit set (which has been elegantly lit by Kurt Landisman), Jennifer King has directed the production so that it builds momentum like a runaway freight train.

While two extremely reliable Bay area actors (Aldo Billingslea and Jeremy Kahn) provide the logical anchors for the drama, Kevin Kemp offers an affable foil to their macho posturing. Emily Jeanne Brown tears through the script like a control freak with a vendetta against the emotional vulnerability caused by male bonding. A woman without the slightest concern for collateral damage, her Jenny knows that numbers don't lie and that's good enough for her.

Performances of Dry Powder continue through July 22 at the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer: