In the late 1990s, it was hard to open the business pages of a daily paper without seeing yet another article about the rise of the Houston-based energy company called Enron. Year after year, Fortune magazine hailed it as the country’s most innovative corporation.
A handful of years later, in turn, there were few bigger business stories than Enron’s implosion amid a welter of fraud convictions and one of the nation’s largest bankruptcies.
This week, Quantum Theatre stages the local premiere of “Enron,” which acclaimed playwright and “Succession” executive producer Lucy Prebble wrote just a few years after the original events took place. The production inhabits a borrowed venue that’s rather ’90s-appropriate: the vacant sixth floor of One Oxford Centre, the gleaming landmark modernist office tower built Downtown in 1983.
With its dark humor and behind-the-scenes corporate setting, Prebble’s 2009 play shares terrain with “Succession.” But the events in “Enron” — as documented by writers like Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind in books like their “The Smartest Guys in the Room” — really happened, with tangible consequences for actual people and even federal financial law.
The play was chosen by Quantum artistic director Karla Boos at the suggestion of director Kyle Haden. One of Boos’ personal reference points was an actor she knew who scored a role in one of Enron’s TV ads, which bid to define that era of corporate ascendancy with their weird, robotic “why, why, why” refrain.
“This commercial was going to like send his kids to college someday!” Boos said. “And then it all crashed.”
Kyle Haden is directing “Enron” for Quantum.
The play focuses on four key characters, including Enron’s folksy founder, Ken Lay; Jeff Skilling, the company’s hubristic CEO; morally flexible CFO Andrew Fastow; and fictitious executive Claudia Rowe, who serves as something of a foil to the others.
The plot revolves around Skilling and Fastow’s dubious financial innovations. One of them was mark-to-market accounting, which allows companies to count anticipated future revenues as current income, and which Enron was the first firm to use outside of the financial services sector. Another is Fastow’s creation of what he calls “raptors”: paper corporations fabricated for the sole purpose of eating Enron’s mounting debts.
But the fast-paced, highly theatrical play teems with minor characters, embodied by a cast of 14: traders, analysts, news reporters, security guards. One character is “Arthur Anderson,” a stand-in for the eponymous accounting firm who appears as a ventriloquist with his dummy. And those raptors? They’re portrayed not as metaphors but as actual meat-eating dinosaurs.
Quantum has further upped the ante by collaborating with Pittsburgh-based Attack Theatre, whose dancers help make the production feel like a musical at times. (The sound design is by Stewart Blackwood.)
In terms of overall effect, though, Haden said “Enron” puts him in a classical mindset.
“To me it has that sort of feel of a great Shakespeare history play, like ‘Henry V’ with the chorus [or] ‘Richard III,’” he said.
“The play is very much a parable,” added Haden, whose previous Quantum collaborations included directing the 2023 Downtown production “The Devil is A Lie.” “It starts with somebody coming out and talking about, we look to great men, or a great man to change the world. One might argue that’s what our society is doing today, wherever you fall on the political spectrum. … And this play is certainly about a man who wanted to change the world.”
That man is Skilling, played for Quantum by Joe McGranahan. Andy Michnya plays Fastow, with Christine Weber as Claudia Rowe.
Lay is played by Ken Bolden, who has a unique perspective on the milieu. For a dozen years starting in the mid-’90s, Bolden worked in human resources in New York City for venerable financial services firm Lehman Brothers.
Bolden said he didn’t know any Enron employees, but he feels he knows the type.
“That aggressive, hyperactive quality that they have is very much present in the play,” he said.
“Enron” isn’t a documentary (though there is a documentary drawing on the same source material, 2005’s “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”). Prebble’s nerdy Fastow, for instance, apparently isn’t much like the person he’s named after.
Still, the play acknowledges the rank-and-file staffers, and the investors, who suffered from Enron’s misdeeds and collapse. And the scandal was bad enough that even Congress saw fit to respond, passing new regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which created, among other things, new penalties for destroying, altering or fabricating financial records.
The play’s cautionary-tale aspect was among its attractions for Quantum’s Boos.
“I believe we are in an era when regulations that have been put in place as a result of things like Enron are now going to be stripped away,” she said. “I think we are going to take the brakes off in this current era. And it’s great to remember why we put the brakes on.”
“Enron” opens Thu., Oct. 30, and runs through Nov. 23. Guests can get pre-show drinks at a pop-up ’90s-style lounge, complete with DJ, and parking in the adjacent garage is free.