Oscar Van Rhijn

Oscar is the elegant, idle son of old-money Agnes van Rhijn, moving through New York drawing rooms with practiced charm and no visible occupation. He needs money badly and sets his sights on marrying it, courting the new-money Russells his mother despises even as he keeps a private life carefully hidden from Fifth Avenue's watchful eyes.

Blake Ritson plays Oscar's calculation and his tenderness as the same smooth surface, so you're never sure which performance is the real one until the show lets you see both. The mercenary courtship plot could be simple hypocrisy; instead it becomes a quiet, sympathetic study of a man pricing his own survival.