Business Notes PRODUCTIONS

Computers blink, phones ring, traders frantically shout buy and sell orders in a verbal version of hand-to-hand combat. A typical day on the New York Stock Exchange?

Not quite. The traders here talk mostly in verse: "That's $80 million on his initial three. And that's from taking a risk instead of a fee." The setting is a stage, and quips fly as fast as stock tips. Serious Money, a new play by Britain's Caryl Churchill, opened last week at Manhattan's Public Theater. The comedy is already a critical and popular smash in London's West End, where it has played to sellout audiences since July. Written as a bawdy, irreverent look at the greed that, in Churchill's view, has permeated London's financial community since last year's Big Bang deregulation, the satire has become all the more timely since the worldwide stock crash. The wild, convoluted plot revolves around an insidious insider-trading scam that leads to murder most foul.

Serious Money attracts many of the same people it skewers. In London, Morgan Stanley bought out the entire house one night, as did Shearson Lehman Bros. Over in New York, the Securities Industry Association is already planning its own night at the Public Theater. If this keeps up, who knows? Maybe brokers will start making their cold-call pitches in verse.