By John Heilpern

January 7, 2001 | 7:00 p.m

I know the plays of Tom Stoppard, and Wendy Wasserstein, if

I may say so, is no Tom Stoppard. The comparison wouldn't normally spring to mind-and it would be an unfair one-were it not for the fact that Ms. Wasserstein's Old Money , her new play about old and new money at Lincoln Center's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre, has borrowed uncomfortably from Arcadia , Mr. Stoppard's best play that was produced with such distinction at Lincoln Center five years ago. Perhaps Old Money is meant as a kind of tribute. Perhaps no one thought we'd notice. But Ms. Wasserstein's bewilderingly lame social satire evokes the same time warps between centuries that take place in a historic house as Mr. Stoppard's famous play does. To make matters worse, the director, Mark Brokaw, even has couples from the different centuries dance as if in a dream-mirroring time past mysteriously melting into time present, as Arcadia did in its most affecting image. It wouldn't matter quite so much if Old Money crackled with the wit and intellectual rigor of the Stoppard, or challenged us to give a thought or two to such vitally important things as goings-on in gazebos, the romance of ideas, the symbolism of gardens (classical symmetry to romantic disorder) or the mysteriously unfolding secrets of an unknowable universe. But Ms. Wasserstein's points about the vulgarities of new money-let alone old-aren't surprising. They're unearned and shallow, like the constant name-dropping throughout the piece-a secondhand substitute for amusing conversation, or even a play. "Fuck me. Or is this some beautiful house!" announces zillionaire film producer Sid Nercessian (dressed in a T-shirt and jeans like David Geffen) as he enters the Upper East Side mansion of Jeffrey Bernstein, a zillionaire arbitrageur and dull arriviste in a linen suit. Nercessian is a loud-mouthed vulgarian, naturally. We know this because he says stuff like "Fuck minimal, give me trees" and "My favorite fucking people in the world are artists." But Ms. Wasserstein's wince-making stabs at Hollywood satire only remind us of better versions. E.g., "Honey, was it Henry James who wrote that Scorsese movie with Winona?" The action-and there is very little of it-revolves round a big house party that Bernstein is throwing during August-a test of his power and a bad running joke in the play. Who would be seen dead in New York in August? Everyone, apparently. Our host is described by someone else in the play as a "master at playing the world to his advantage." He's "brilliant, but a social enigma." He seemed a bit dim to me. But hence his glittering, enigmatic party in August. Don't worry if you weren't invited. "Everybody came," as Alice B. Toklas put it, "and no one made any difference." Ms. Wasserstein drops all the usual names like a tired mantra of tedium-Diane and Barry, Martha Stewart, Jeffrey Katzenberg, "Bobby Rubin," "Gwyneth," the Trumps, Puff Daddy, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Charlie Rose, Henry Kissinger, etc., etc. There's a whiff of déjà vu about this "new" Gilded Age elite, as if her barbarians at the gates are still stuck in the Saul Steinberg era. Their baubles of wealth are more on the money-restored mansions, Botox injections, museum board memberships, Gulf jets, party consultants, surgery. But Ms. Wasserstein's take on celebrity and society is scarcely fresh. She laboriously explains the obvious. "You see, Mr. Pfeiffer, in your day it was all about bloodlines," expounds Flinty, a wealth-obsessed social columnist. She's the Boswell of the new aristocracy for something called The New York Chronicle . (The names are real, only the newspaper has been changed to protect the playwright.) Mr. Pfeiffer is Tobias Vivian Pfeiffer III, a WASP of the old school and a Louis Auchincloss character who lived in the Bernstein mansion as a child. He needs flighty Flinty's social lesson like a hole in the head. "Over 50 percent of the richest men in America were also in the Social Register," she drones on to him, lest we miss Ms. Wasserstein's dated message. "But now society has merged with celebrity. Cash frankly has superseded class. We live in an asset-based meritocracy. There are 64 new millionaires a day in Silicon Valley and no one cares where they came from…." There's news for you! We live in an age of celebrity! Then again, these aren't characters, but mouthpieces and labels. There's also Saulina-the Pure Artist as Troubled Outsider Displaced by a Society Run by Vulgarians. Saulina's a bohemian sculptress and the ex-sister-in-law of Bernstein who's given to maudlin pieties in the name of plucky backbone. "I have very little wisdom, Caroline. But one thing I can promise you," she tells the suicidal teen daughter of the movie mogul. "If you and I try very hard, then they don't have to win. But if you give up, you'll never know how strong you can be." Saulina is actually the living, wilting contradiction of inner strength, but let it pass. We are meant to feel for her because she feels excluded by wealthy ignoramuses. Ms. Wasserstein's sloppy sentiment would like to have us believe anything. "It's all right," Tobias Vivian Pfeiffer III consoles Saulina in an intimate moment. "Cry, Selina. Cry for me. Cry for your sister Jessica. Cry for Ovid and Caroline. Just cry for all of us." Cut to the commercial. (One thinks.) Who else talks this way? Our emotional involvement in this crass bunch is presumed, as name-dropping is presumed to encourage easy laughs. Such names! Ovid-"Cry for Ovid and Caroline," as opposed to "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina"-is one Ovid Walpole Bernstein, the mini-adult, 17-year-old son of Jeffrey. Why is a nice zillionaire like Jeffrey Bernstein naming his son Ovid Walpole? For comic effect, we assume. For myself, silly names are plain silly. Does Wendy Washingmachine want us to take her characters seriously or not? Either way, she's surely been wittier than this. "Do you know the gavotte?" Tobias Vivian says to Saulina, asking her to dance in an elderly romantic interlude. "Sounds like a French and Yiddish cake," she replies. Does it? I'm sorry to harp. But what's French and Yiddish and cake-like about the gavotte? But the strain of being Stoppardian is nowhere more creaky than in the confusing turn-of-the-century scenes that are meant to parallel the coarse present. The movie mogul becomes a bullying Gilded Age Carnegie, the arbitrageur a Jewish department store entrepreneur, the sculptor the Edwardian eccentric and so on. Vulgar then, vulgar now, is the unremarkable message. (Shallow then and now, too.) Ms. Wasserstein's re-creation of the past in Old Money is as sketchy as her present, but messier. I found it difficult to figure out who was who, or why. An entrance from the turn of the century is invariably accompanied by much enforced gaiety and laughter, followed by a rousing chorus of "Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay." The stilted, sub-Whartonesque dialogue is too close for comfort to a version of Ragtime and, worse, Titanic . "Don't you find the 20th century thrilling, Mr. Strauss?" "You're not worried about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Miss Gallagher?" "Nothing will be the same! Not in painting, not in marriage, not in war! This will be the century of American ingenuity!" Truth be told, the Old Money ensemble seems uncomfortable in the midst of all this self-conscious tittle-tattle and dud time-bends. Only Mary Beth Hurt in the dual roles of Saulina/Sally looks as if she might be having some fun. Thomas Lynch's most handsome mansion set appears grandly as the only authentic touch. The rest is dispiriting, right down to Ms. Wasserstein's leaden explanation of her own play through the medical procedure known as "anastomose." It's the process, apparently, of two arteries becoming one. If so, we're entitled to ask, where's the blood? It's no crime to write a poor play, but Ms. Wasserstein has written a careless, anemic one. Plays of ideas- An American Daughter and now Old Money -aren't her strength, and Mr. Stoppard, who on occasion can be effervescently too clever by three-quarters, resides on a lofty perch of his own.