The story of the collapse of Enron reminds of the adage “plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose“: it’s a story of arrogant fucks who are convinced that the rules don’t apply to them, and who are supported in that belief by the self-serving interests of an entire ecosystem of people and institutions who benefit from turning a blind eye to their crimes and transgressions. It’s a story that’s pretty depressing and dispiriting, especially when you consider that the moral vacuity and cynicism at its center are also fueling the nascent oligarchy in this country.
But I get ahead of myself. Enron, written in 2009 by Lucy Prebble, traces the rise and fall of the Enron corporation under the leadership of Kenneth Lay (its founder and CEO), Jeff Skilling (its president), and Andy Fastow (its CFO). During the late 1990s and under Skilling’s leadership the company went from producing and selling gas and oil to trading in energy commodities: Skilling pioneered and implemented obfuscatory accounting strategies like “mark to market” to create the impression that Enron was more profitable than it actually was, fueling belief in both the company’s current value and its future earnings. When this illusion threatened to unravel, financing wonk Andy Fastow took advantage of regulatory loopholes to create shell companies, backed almost entirely by Enron’s own stock, that purchased its debts and took them off of Enron’s books (he called these shell companies “raptors”). As obviously fraudulent as this scheme was, it nonetheless received a greenlight from their accounting firm, Arthur Andersen (incentivized by the desire to retain Enron as one of their multimillion dollar clients) as well as from their lawyers (ditto) and their board (stockholders, all). Fastow’s Ponzi scheme worked great right up until it didn’t: the company’s share price skyrocketed and its valuation ballooned, but then Enron and its rapacious trading practices played a pivotal role in the California electricity crisis of 2000, and the company came under close scrutiny by the press, regulators, and the public. Within months the entire house of cards collapsed: Enron went bankrupt and Lay, Skilling, and Fastow were all eventually convicted of financial crimes (Lay died before being sentenced, and Skilling and Fastow both served time in prison).
The story Prebble traces here has also been told in other forms, most notably in the documentary film The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005); Prebble’s aim here seems to be less in merely documenting the story than in capturing how the “irrational exuberance” (Alan Greenspan’s words, quoted in the play) surrounding chimera like stock valuations (or, today, cryptocurrency) gets manufactured and propped up by collective blindness (and/or madness). Prebble populates her world with characters who seem to lack moral compass, and the Quantum Theatre production, directed by Kyle Haden, gives us little to like about any of them. Joseph McGranaghan plays Skilling as a cold-fish sociopath, self-absorbed and cocky and, in the end, utterly unrepentant even after bankrupting thousands of trusting shareholders and employees; he defines himself by his belief in his own superiority (this is clearly a man who continued to love The Fountainhead after his twenties). As Ken Lay, Ken Bolden is a Teflon man, slick, slippery, and more than a little toxic. John Michnya plays Andy Fastow as an insecure, easily bullied beta male, so eager to curry favor with Skilling that he creates a monstrous illegal scheme (neatly theatricalized in the play by actors in raptor suits who become his office pets); he actually does recognize that what he’s doing is unethical, but is too spineless to resist the lure of power and wealth. There’s only one character for whom we might muster some sympathy – Christine Weber’s Claudia Roe, the female executive who is ousted in favor of Skilling – but even she comes across as rather ethically compromised.
The production is set in a big empty floor of an under-renovation office building downtown – scenic designer Sasha Jin Schwartz has carved out a spare and flexible space onto which the sizable ensemble (there are eleven additional ensemble members, five of whom are dancers from Attack Theatre) wheel desks, tables, chairs, and other scenic elements to create the offices and busy trading floors on which the action takes place. The storytelling is augmented by Kolton Cotton’s projection design, which both incorporates media from the late 90s and offers a vivid visualization of the stock exchange and the company’s stock price; at one point, the scenic design and media work together to reveal Enron’s moment of collapse, as the graph bar indicating the stock valuation slides to nil and the wall on which it was projected suddenly reveals its innards of insulation and wires. The sound design, by Stewart Blackwood, helps create the high-flying exuberance of the 1990’s-“it’s the economy, stupid”-bubble, the chaos and testosterone-fueled energy of the trading floor, and the creepy vibe of Fastow’s corrupt scheme, with a soundtrack reminiscent of Jurassic Park for his “clever girl” raptors.
Speaking of the raptors: they are just one of a number of metaphors Prebble mobilizes in support of helping to clarify complicated themes and issues. Some of them (like the raptors) work better than others: for example, she has Andy use a set of nesting boxes to help explain how he will structure a series of “independent” companies to hide Enron’s debt; and the consultant from Arthur Andersen speaks through a ventriloquist’s dummy, emblematizing the way the system of accountability had (and still has?) self-dealing baked into its very structure. Others feel less subtle: for example, the Enron board is represented by three blind mice, and the law firm by blindfolded symbols of justice, all unambiguous referents to the inability, or refusal, to look into the black box of Enron’s fraud.
One of the takeaways from this play is that such illuminating metaphors can serve a useful purpose: a reason bad actors like Skilling and Fastow get away with malfeasance is because what they do is complicated and opaque; it’s hard to hold someone accountable for something when you don’t understand how it works. The relevance to our current situation is obvious; one need only take a look at the recent New York Times article by Finn Brunton about the connections between cryptocurrency, libertarianism, and autocracy to understand that we live in the world Skilling, Fastow, and their comrades in Ayn Randian-sociopathy created – and to realize how dangerous it continues to be to turn a blind eye to what’s going on.
