(MONEY Magazine) – What would a hit playwright know about investing and takeovers? Plenty, in the case of Jerry Sterner. A former packager of real estate tax shelters and a serious part-time stock market investor, Sterner wrote Other People's Money, the new SRO off-Broadway show about buy-outs. The play, soon to be a movie, satirizes the chaos caused when Larry ''the Liquidator'' Garfinkle, a New York City raider, sets his sights on a small Rhode Island manufacturing firm. MONEYsenior editor Richard Eisenberg buttonholed Sterner, 50, and found his voice reminiscent of Rodney Dangerfield's but his views on takeovers and the foibles of investors hardly comical: Q. % Your play takes a tough view on takeovers. But didn't a killing from a rust- belt company that was taken over free you to become a full-time playwright? A. Yes, I benefited. I'm not saying that people don't benefit from takeovers. The chief benefit is that you're worth more today than yesterday if you're a stockholder. The people who finance the deal are better off. Lawyers make fees and pay taxes on them -- hopefully -- and they buy their wives furs or their husbands Jaguars. So some people are doing real well -- but possibly at a longer-term cost that I'm not sure any of us are truly aware of. Q. What cost? A. We are mortgaging America's future. If CBS, say, is using its cash flow to service debt, then it has less money to develop new programs or to start new ventures. Because if you don't pay that guy the interest, forget new programming. That's the least of your problems.

Q. What advice would you offer to an employee caught in a takeover attempt? A. I'd tell him to start watching out for his own ass. That's what management will be doing. Q. And what advice would you give to a shareholder of that company? A. I don't know. Most shareholders in that situation don't look for advice. They just look up toward heaven and say, ''Aren't I smart?''

Q. In the play, Kate, the company's lawyer, says that one day Congress will pass a law to put raiders out of business. Do you think there ought to be a law? A. There should be a law, which I am not smart enough to write, that rewards productive takeovers and penalizes takeovers done just to enrich a few at the expense of many. Q. Will Congress pass that law? A. I think Congress has the will but not the intelligence. Q. What do you look for when you invest in stocks? A. I never buy a stock unless I first visit the company and have a rapport with the chief executive officer or the chief financial officer. Before I visit, I read the company's annual reports and 10-Ks and try to talk to its competitors and customers. It's extraordinary to me that before somebody buys a car, he'll get Consumer Reports and Road & Track, talk to 14 neighbors and visit five showrooms. But tell that guy, ''Do I have a stock for you!'' and he hands you a check for 25 grand. All he gets is a piece of paper. He doesn't even get a car. Q. How have you done as an investor? A. I don't approach Warren Buffett, but I really have done very well. Q. Will your next play be about money? A. Yes, because how someone deals with money tells you more about him than anything. Money has no personality. So what people see when they look at a dollar is their own reflection.