Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – There’s nothing like a night at the theater with a comedy-drama about corporate financial fraud.
OK, that doesn’t sound great, does it?
Let’s see if we can make it better. It wasn’t mere fraud, it was the biggest corporate scandal in U.S. history, and the playwright is Lucy Prebble, of “Succession” fame.
Prebble, from Britain, is an Emmy-winning executive producer who wrote two episodes of the masterful HBO show about the powerful and dysfunctional family behind a media dynasty.
Prior to that, three of her plays went to the stage. The second of those was “Enron,” the story of the Houston energy company that filed for bankruptcy in 2001 — and became the largest corporate bankruptcy case in U.S. history at the time — 2001 after revelations that it was making up its profits out of thin air.
Enron’s book-cooking led to the dissolution of Enron and one of the nation’s oldest accounting firms, Arthur Andersen; billions of dollars in shareholder lawsuits; the tragic loss of 20,000 jobs and employee pensions; and multiple convictions, including the imprisonment of CEO Jeffrey Skilling, who was born in Pittsburgh but left as a child.
Most plays that hit Pittsburgh come with hype of them being Broadway smashes. “Enron” doesn’t. It opened in London in July 2009 and was well-received, hanging around for the better part of a year. It opened on Broadway in April 2010 and closed five weeks later, due in part to the pan by The New York Times’ Ben Brantley, who wrote that like Enron’s deeds, the play “isn’t much more than smoke and mirrors itself.” The Daily News called it “good, dumb fun” and The Daily News said it played like “‘60 Minutes’ on acid.”
Back in the England, The Guardian responded with an editorial noting, “I suspect there is a lingering suspicion of a British dramatist’s right [to] tackle a profoundly American subject.”
Three days before it closed, “Enron” received four Tony nominations, including best original score.
Selling ‘Enron’
Ten years later, Kyle Haden had plenty of time during the COVID-19 pandemic to catch up on his reading, and one of the plays on his list was Prebble’s “Enron.”
When the scandal was unfolding, the Pittsburgh actor-director, who is also assistant professor of acting at Carnegie Mellon University, was in grad school at Columbia University in New York and had only a mild interest in the collapse of Enron.
“When I read the play,” he says, “I was entranced by how inventive it was and how it really felt Shakespearean in the way that it had this sort of titular character that had these moments of direct address, these characters that felt like a chorus. But yet, it was this modern story that we all sort of knew that it took us inside. I also felt like no one would ever let me direct it because of some of the elements.”
Haden, whose Pittsburgh directing credits have included “The Chief” (Pittsburgh Public Theater), “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley” (City Theatre Company) and “The Devil is a Lie” (Quantum Theatre), met with Quantum artistic director Karla Boos to talk about what he might do for the 2025-26 season.
“She asked me to pitch some Shakespeare plays to her and when I was finished, I said, ‘Hey, you know, Shakespeare is great. I love Shakespeare, Karla. Here’s the play I really want to direct,’ not thinking that she would actually let me do it. She called me back two days later and was like ‘Let’s go!’ ”
“I loved the play,” Boos says, “the crazy theatricality of it. Arthur Andersen as a ventriloquist’s dummy! Debt-eating raptors! To me, the events seemed so recent, I couldn’t believe it was 25 years ago. And then I started to think about how innocent we were then, shocked that a greed-driven corporation took advantage of people, which resulted in regulation -— possible even under Bush.
“I think we’re about to dismantle the brakes,” she adds, “so it’s good to revisit this debacle and protections we may want to hold onto.”
Haden wasn’t too surprised by Boos’ reaction, he said, because “Quantum is really known for being inventive, bold and daring. I did a show with them a couple of years ago that was a cool take on ‘Doctor Faustus’ that involved Snoop Dogg, that had people doing live-polling on their cellphones.”
“Enron” will take over the sixth floor of One Oxford Centre with a 14-member cast that includes Joe McGranaghan (Quantum’s “King Lear” and “The Task”) as Skilling, John Michnya (Quantum’s “Chimerica”) as Skilling protege Andy Fastow, Ken Bolden (Quantum’s “Seagull”) as Enron founder Ken Lay and Christine Weber (“The Devil is a Lie”) as the fictional creation Claudia Roe.
It will also include video projections and appearances by dancers from Attack Theatre.
“How fitting it is to be in Oxford Centre,” Boos says, “which at the time of Enron was the coolest place: Kay Barchetti Shoes! That sexy wine bar you rode an escalator up to!”
En-wrong
As someone who’s tried to get people to watch “Succession,” I’m aware that a lot of people bail on it early because “none of the characters are likable.”
True enough. Likewise, the main cast of “Enron” is not exactly full of Jimmy Stewart types.
“I think you like some of the rank-in-file folks,” Haden says, “and I think Skilling is really charismatic, so I think it’s one of those guys where maybe you can’t turn away from him. I keep going back to the Shakespeare parallel, but Richard III is somebody who has so much charisma, even though he’s a bad guy. So, do you like him? I don’t know if you don’t like him, but maybe you can’t resist him.
“It’s like Don Draper on ‘Mad Men.’ Do you like Don Draper? Do you want him to be your friend? You probably don’t. He’s not reliable, but you loved watching him every week. Like, what was he gonna do next? How was he going to get away with whatever he was getting away with?”
The other “Succession” parallel is that the show was always about “the deal,” but what was the deal? It was always a bit elusive to the viewer. So, should people watch “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” (the documentary is available on Prime) before taking the elevator to the sixth floor?
“There’s talk about commodities,” Haden says. “There’s one sequence where when Skilling gets the job and in his head he’s sort of picturing the perfect company and they’re singing about the price of gold and silver and pork belly, and then the traders come in and they’re just sort of doing trader talk and it’s just vibes.
“You understand the concept because we have a fantastic team — and Peter Kope and Michele de la Reza from Attack Theatre do a great job of making that clear — but Prebble just has this way of making a concept super clear, so when you do need to explain something complicated, she lays it out for you in a simple way. Then, the stuff that maybe is a little bit deeper, she can gloss over it somewhat. You don’t have to go deep into it because you’re really looking at the relationship between characters or something.”
Cutting to the chase, Haden says, “I think the thing about Enron was really about the hubris of these folks. They really felt like they were smarter than everyone else and were able to get away with these things — and, ultimately, they outsmarted themselves.”
Beyond Brantley
As for the Brantley review and the abrupt Broadway closing back in 2010, Haden has a few theories on “Enron” now and then.
“I was living in New York at the time,” he says, “and we were nine years out from 9/11 and a year or two removed from the latest financial crisis. Was it just too close to those things? Was it too soon? Were we too close to the event to be able to see it clearly?
“Skilling was still appealing his case to the Supreme Court at that time, so it still wasn’t fully resolved in some ways. When they were doing it in London, Lay had just passed away. So, I wonder if that had something to do with it. We’re now much further away from it. It’ll be 25 years next year since the company collapsed, so I think the distance may help somewhat.”
Anecdotally, the feedback is promising.
“There’s a lot of excitement about it around town,” he says. “I’ve talked to several people who worked for Arthur Andersen who are really excited to see it, so I think that’s a good sign. They lived through the trauma of it, and they’re like, ‘We’re coming to see the play!’ So, that’s positive.”
It runs through Nov. 23. Showtimes this weekend are 7:30 p.m. Thursday (sold out), 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $70; $35 for those aged under 30. Free parking is available in the adjoining garage and a pre-show dinner is available in the Rivers Club; quantumtheatre.com/enron.
