| Enron | |
|---|---|
 Poster for the Broadway production | |
| Written by | Lucy Prebble |
| Characters | Claudia Roe Kenneth Lay Jeffrey Skilling Andy Fastow |
| Date premiered | 17 September 2009 |
| Place premiered | Festival Theatre, Chichester, United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | The Enron scandal |
| Setting | USA, 1992–2001 |
| Official site | |
Enron (stylised as ENRON) is a 2009 play by the British playwright Lucy Prebble, based on the Enron scandal. [1]
Enron premiered at the Chichester Festival Theatre (11 July – 29 August 2009), before London transfers to the Jerwood Downstairs at the Royal Court Theatre from 17 September to 7 November 2009 and then the Noël Coward Theatre from 16 January to 14 August 2010 (after a cast change on 8 May). [2] Directed by Rupert Goold with associate Sophie Hunter, [3] the cast featured Samuel West as Jeffrey Skilling, Tom Goodman-Hill as Andrew Fastow, Amanda Drew as Claudia Roe, and Tim Pigott-Smith as Ken Lay. [4]
Enron premiered on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre on 8 April 2010 in previews, with the official opening on 27 April. Directed by Rupert Goold with associate Sophie Hunter, the scenic and costume design was by Anthony Ward, lighting by Mark Henderson, music and sound by Adam Cork, video and projection by Jon Driscoll and movement by Scott Ambler. Gregory Itzin starred as Kenneth Lay with Norbert Leo Butz as Jeffrey Skilling, Marin Mazzie as Claudia Roe, and Stephen Kunken as Andrew Fastow. [5] The Broadway production of Enron closed on 9 May 2010; [6] it lasted just over a month. The Guardian 's critic Michael Billington speculated that it was The New York Times ' "hostile" review that contributed to its premature closure. [7] He also stated its failure to earn nominations at the Tony Awards in major categories was its "kiss of death". [7]
Enron was premiered in Reykjavik City Theatre in September 2010, in Dublin as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in October 2010 and in Helsinki (Helsinki City Theatre) in November 2010.
The play concerns the financial scandal and collapse of "ENRON", the American energy corporation, based in Texas. Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling and his boss Kenneth Lay are shown, as well as Skilling's protege Andy Fastow, who rises to become the chief financial officer.
| Character | West End | Broadway |
|---|---|---|
| Claudia Roe | Amanda Drew | Marin Mazzie |
| Kenneth Lay | Tim Pigott-Smith | Gregory Itzin |
| Jeffrey Skilling | Samuel West | Norbert Leo Butz |
| Andy Fastow | Tom Goodman-Hill | Stephen Kunken |
| Gayle Davenport | Gillian Budd | Jordan Ballard |
| Lehman Brothers | Peter Caulfield / Tom Godwin | Rightor Doyle/ Anthony Holds |
| Security Officer | Howard Charles | Brandon Dirden |
| Irene Gant | Susannah Fellows | Lusia Strus |
| Arthur Andersen | Stephen Fewell | Anthony Holds |
| Senator | Orion Lee | Tom Nelis |
| Elise Da Luca | Eleanor Matsuura | January LaVoy |
| Trader | Ashley Rolfe | Brandon Dirden Rightor Doyle Anthony Holds Ty Jones Ian Kahn Tom Nelis Jeff Skowron Noah Weisberg |
| Lawyer | Trevor White | Ian Kahn Ty Jones Donald Ferguson |
| Daughter | Mary Stewart Sullivan |
Tim Walker, the Sunday Telegraph critic, gave it five stars, drawing parallels with the plot to that of King Lear. "While it isn't done any more to say this in the financial pages, I say it here with conviction: Enron is a strong buy," he wrote. [8] [9] [10]
In The New York Times review of the Broadway production, Ben Brantley wrote, contrary to some other critics, "even with a well-drilled cast that includes bright Broadway headliners like Norbert Leo Butz and Marin Mazzie, the realization sets in early that this British-born exploration of smoke-and-mirror financial practices isn’t much more than smoke and mirrors itself. Enron is fast-paced, flamboyant and, despite the head-clogging intricacy of its business mathematics, lucid to the point of simple-mindedness. But as was true of the company of this play's title, the energy generated here often feels factitious, all show (or show and tell) and little substance." [11]
Michael Billington, critic for The Guardian , dubbed Brantley's comments an "obtuse and hostile review", [7] stating that "Enron's fate was sealed the moment Brantley's review appeared [...] As a fellow critic, I respect Brantley's right to his opinion; what is dismaying is his failure to see what Prebble and Goold were up to [...] But no serious play on Broadway can survive a withering attack from The New York Times, which carries the force of a papal indictment". [7]
Enron won the 2009 Theatrical Management Association award for Best New Play and was also nominated for Best Performance in a Play (Samuel West). In the 2009 Evening Standard Theatre Awards, it won Best Director [12] and was nominated for Best Actor (for West) and Best Play (for Prebble). [13] [14]
The play received Tony Award nominations for the 2010 Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre, [15] 2010 Best Featured Actor in a Play (Kunken), 2010 Best Lighting Design of a Play (Mark Henderson), and 2010 Best Sound Design of a Play (Adam Cork). [16]
Andrew Stuart Fastow is an American convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy. Fastow was one of the key figures behind the complex web of off-balance-sheet special purpose entities used to conceal Enron's massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets. By unlawfully maintaining personal stakes in these ostensibly independent ghost-entities, he was able to defraud Enron out of tens of millions of dollars.
Samuel Alexander Joseph West is an English actor, theatre director and narrator. He has directed on stage and radio, and worked as an actor in theatre, film, television, and radio. He has appeared as reciter with orchestras and performed at the Last Night of the Proms in 2002. He has narrated several documentary series, including five for the BBC about the Second World War.
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Conor McPherson is an Irish playwright, screenwriter and director of stage and film. In recognition of his contribution to world theatre, McPherson was awarded a doctorate of Literature, Honoris Causa, in June 2013 by the University College Dublin.
Sophie Okonedo is an English actress and narrator. Okonedo was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2010 and Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019, both for services to drama. The recipient of a Tony Award, she has been nominated for an Academy Award, three BAFTA TV Award, Emmy Award, and a Golden Globe Award.
Norbert Leo Butz is an American actor and singer. He is best known for his work in Broadway theatre. He is a two-time winner of the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, and is one of only nine actors ever to have won the award twice.
Speed-the-Plow is a 1988 play by David Mamet that is a satirical dissection of the American movie business. As stated in The Producer's Perspective, "this is a theme Mamet would revisit in his later films Wag the Dog (1997) and State and Main (2000)". As quoted in The Producer's Perspective, Jack Kroll of Newsweek described Speed-the-Plow as "another tone poem by our nation's foremost master of the language of moral epilepsy."
The Coast of Utopia is a 2002 trilogy of plays: Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, written by Tom Stoppard with focus on the philosophical debates in pre-revolution Russia between 1833 and 1866. It was the recipient of the 2007 Tony Award for Best Play. The title comes from a chapter in Avrahm Yarmolinsky's book Road to Revolution: A Century of Russian Radicalism (1959).
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 American documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney. It examines the 2001 collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives during the ensuing Enron scandal, and contains a section about the involvement of Enron traders in the 2000-01 California electricity crisis. Archival footage is used alongside new interviews with McLean and Elkind, several former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters, and former Governor of California Gray Davis.
Aikaterini Hadjipateras, known professionally as Kathryn Hunter, is an American-born British actress and theatre director, known for her appearances as Arabella Figg in the Harry Potter film series, Eedy Karn in the Disney+ Star Wars spinoff series Andor, and as the Three Witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth.
Shining City is a play by Conor McPherson, set in Dublin, which was first performed in the West End in 2004.
Marin Joy Mazzie was an American actress and singer known for her work in musical theatre.
Emily "Eve" Best is an English actress and director. She is known for her television roles as Dr. Eleanor O'Hara in the Showtime series Nurse Jackie (2009–2013), First Lady Dolley Madison in the American Experience television special (2011), and Monica Chatwin in the BBC miniseries The Honourable Woman (2014). She also played Wallis Simpson in the 2010 film The King's Speech.
Rupert Goold is an English director who works primarily in theatre. He is the artistic director of the Almeida Theatre, and was the artistic director of Headlong Theatre Company (2005–2013).
Tom Goodman-Hill is an English actor of film, television, theatre and radio.
Lucy AshtonPrebble is a British playwright and producer. She is the author of the plays The Sugar Syndrome, The Effect, ENRON and A Very Expensive Poison. For television, she adapted Secret Diary of a Call Girl and co-created I Hate Suzie with her close friend Billie Piper - in addition to serving as a writer and an executive producer on Succession, for which she received two Primetime Emmy Awards.
Stephen Michael Kunken is an American actor. He is known for the roles of Ari Spyros on Showtime's Billions and Commander Putnam on Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale. His film work includes work with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Paul Greengrass, Ang Lee, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard and others. Graduating with top honors from The Juilliard School, Kunken has an extensive and celebrated theater career appearing on Broadway in 7 different Productions and countless off-Broadway and Regional productions. He is most readily known for playing Andy Fastow in the Broadway play Enron, for which he received a Tony Award nomination for Featured Actor in a Play. Other Broadway credits include Frost/Nixon and Rock 'n' Roll'.
Peter Caulfield is an English actor.
Sophie Irene Hunter is an English theatre director, playwright and former actress and singer. She made her directorial debut in 2007 co-directing the experimental play The Terrific Electric at the Barbican Pit after her theatre company Boileroom was granted the Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award. In addition, she has directed an Off-Off-Broadway revival of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts (2010) at Access Theatre, the performance art titled Lucretia (2011) based on Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia at Location One's Abramovic Studio in New York City, and the Phantom Limb Company's 69° South also known as Shackleton Project (2011) which premièred at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre and later toured North America.
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