Greed Kills: ‘Enron’ at Quantum Theatre

For a comedy about a real-life tragedy, try Enron. The play by British writer Lucy Prebble can be seen through November 23 in a rare U.S. production by Pittsburgh’s Quantum Theatre. It’s a sometimes-surreal (and yet mostly accurate) depiction of sleazy scams perpetrated at the American firm Enron, which crashed with devastating consequences in 2001. 

You’ve got dancers dressed as ravenous reptiles writhing snake-like around the set. (Enron’s actual finance executive, Andy Fastow, created crooked shell companies that were called, internally, Raptors.) You’ve got blind mice, in the form of actors wearing big white mouse heads. (Presumably they represent Enron’s board of directors, who should’ve provided responsible oversight.) And the Lehman Brothers investment bank is portrayed, hilariously, by two actors joined back-to-back as Siamese twins. (Although the real Lehman Brothers survived a dalliance with Enron, the bank kept on doing behind-the-back deals and later died in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-08.) Elements like these add up to a play that’s often silly and spooky at the same time. 

But real Enron also pulled stunts that were just too despicable to make fun of. In dramatizing those, Enron turns dead serious, and I’ll give an example shortly. First let’s tackle a question that has haunted the play in recent years.

Is the Subject Too Complicated to Understand?

Playwright Prebble took a big risk when she wrote Enron. The real scams, the various dirty deeds that eventually undid the company, were almost unfathomably complex. Until judgment day came, Enron’s executives were able to fool investors into believing their company was a great American success story—which they did by inflating their profits and hiding losses in ways so tricky that even financial experts failed to red-flag them. Do you happen to know how mark-to-market accounting can be abused? Or off-book special-purpose entities (SPEs)? I sort of do, because aside from reviewing plays, I’ve done a lot of writing about business and socioeconomic issues. But I’m guessing that many theatergoers haven’t a clue. 

Lucy Prebble went ahead anyway. She even had two lead characters, Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling and CFO Fastow, explain the intricacies of scamming onstage, in reductively silly scenes which somehow sort of work. And Enron was a hit when it debuted in London in 2009. Then came the ill-fated Broadway premiere. In a kiss-of-death review, New York Times critic Ben Brantley called the play a “flashy but labored economics lesson,” full of “smoke and mirrors” but lacking substance, like Enron itself. Enron closed on Broadway soon after and hasn’t gained much traction stateside ever since. 

My takes are twofold. Number one, don’t worry about whether you will get the technical details of the scams. What’s made clear is that they are scams. That’s all you will need. Number two, congratulations to Quantum—and to its producing partner, the Attack Theatre dance company—for staging Enron in the year 2025. While relevance alone can’t make a play resonate, it helps, and we’re arguably now living in a time of smoke and mirrors and sleaze. 

My only request is that if you go, please try to appreciate the play as more than an exercise in liberal schadenfreude. It’s too easy to sit there thinking Oh yeah, those big-business types sure are wicked. And by extension, Yep our nation’s leaders are very wicked. Instead, try to watch and listen a level deeper. The details that matter lie in the words and behaviors of the main characters: villain-in-chief Skilling (acted by Joseph McGranaghan), his dark-money accomplice Fastow (John Michnya), Enron chairman and enabler-in-chief Ken Lay (Ken Bolden), and fiery-but-frustrated female exec Claudia Roe, the lone voice of conscience in the crew (a fictionalized stand-in for Rebecca Mark, who headed Enron’s international unit; acted here by Christine Weber). They’ve all got something to tell you. In my view, especially Jeffrey Skilling. 

‘Who Do You Think Is Going to Win?’

Enron did much of its business in energy trading—buying and selling supplies of electricity and natural gas, always with the aim to buy low, sell high. One of the company’s most dastardly deeds was manipulating the electricity market in California. Through schemes with code names like “Death Star,” Enron helped to trigger calamities that included sky-high pricing spikes, rolling blackouts, the collapse of a major utility company, and more. 

Enron defended its actions by shifting blame onto California’s poorly designed regulatory system, which left loopholes for manipulators to work their way in. A PR job of that magnitude is best done by someone who holds a black belt in gaslighting, and the play has Skilling showing that he’s the man for the job. At one point, when challenged as to whether it’s ethical to take advantage of the weakness of others, he’s indignant: “Take advantage?!” He argues, essentially, that it’s not a matter of ethics; it’s a matter of survival in competitive markets. Presented with an advantage, you take it. This seems to be, in his mind, a Darwinian view, for elsewhere in the play he says “Business is nature,” and we learn that Darwin is a hero of Skilling’s. He says Darwin demonstrated “the power of an idea.” The notion that he might be misinterpreting Darwin’s theory never comes up. Skilling likes the idea of power. 

Speaking directly to California’s flawed system, Skilling scoffs at the second-rate college graduates who had to settle for government jobs. No wonder they left holes in the regs. The result, he sneers, was “a system of such complexity, designed by people of such simplicity.” Then Skilling delivers a chilling punchline. “Who do you think is going to win, the greedy or the inept?”

Given how Skilling’s role is written and acted, I read him as more than a brazen bully. He’s a man entirely too wrapped up in justifying himself. Flexing not his muscles, but his intellect, to prove that he’s a smart Alpha fox surrounded by sheepish dogs. And flexing his intellect so far out of shape that he becomes mentally lopsided: unable or unwilling to grasp that cheating doesn’t count as being smart. Greedy for more than money, for recognition. Oblivious to the possibility that when greed prevails, maybe nobody wins, because greed kills. 

Drop this man into a culture such as Enron’s, inhabited by people who likewise tend to the loppy end of the scale, and you get a petri dish of toxic contagion. In reality, when the deviousness at Enron was finally exposed, the company’s plummet into bankruptcy sucked value out of investment portfolios everywhere and left about 20,000 employees both jobless and holding worthless stock options. In the play, the tale is lampooned as a wacky carnival turned trainwreck. Which amounts to a pretty accurate rendition.

See how you read Enron. See, too, if the play provokes any thoughts regarding what any of us might do to ward off the sinister spell cast by Enronmania. I am thinking the spell wells up from the deeply intertwined roots of our national culture. And I suspect the play’s bottom-line message might be: America, it’s been fun! Now bye-bye, nitey-nite. 

Closing Credits and Ticket Info

Lucy Prebble’s Enron is directed for Quantum Theatre by Kyle Haden. Per Quantum’s tradition of doing plays in found locations, this one is presented through November 23 on a vacant office floor in the One Oxford Centre skyscraper. Reserve seats on the Quantum website, where you’ll also find instructions for attending at 301 Grant St., Downtown. 

Along with the actors named above, performers in the large cast are Jamie Agnello, Amy Landis, José Pérez IV, Isaac Miller, Tru Verret-Fleming, Parag S. Gohel, Zelda Ungerman—a child actor who appears on a projection screen as Jeffrey Skilling’s daughter—and dancers (who act multiple roles in addition to dancing) Isabella Bergamin, Anya Epstein, Jax RF McAtee, and William VanSlander. 

The co-choreographers are Attack Theatre’s Peter Kope and Michele de la Reza. Scenic design is by Sasha Jin Schwartz, with lighting by C. Todd Brown, sound and composition by Stewart Blackwood, and projections by Kolton Cotton. Costumes are by Damian E. Dominguez. The director of production is Alex Ungerman and the technical director is Cubbie McCrory. Cory F. Goddard is the stage manager, assisted by Ian Thomas, and numerous other persons have conspired to produce this theatrical venture. 

Photos by Jason Snyder.

Mike Vargo, an independent writer based in Pittsburgh, reviews theater and the visual arts for Entertainment Central. 

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