The “Enron” that opened on Broadway last night isn’t a lecture or a documentary. It’s a show.
After snoozing through many well-meaning tracts about Iraq, the prospect of a play about a financial meltdown wasn’t appealing. But “Enron” is a whip-smart, edge-of-your-seat ride that’d rival anything at Six Flags — there are even raptor-headed businessmen prancing around.
To recount the rise and fall of the Houston company and its scheming CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, the British team of playwright Lucy Prebble and director Rupert Goold (Patrick Stewart’s “Macbeth”) had to tackle such arid topics as commodity trading and mark-to-market accounting. But they make the financial sleights of hand and power struggles both easy to follow and unabashedly flashy. And so we get whiz-bang projections, Kenneth Lay (Gregory Itzin, from “24”) leading a board of literal blind mice, and traders whipping themselves into a frenzy to blaring techno music.
Skilling drives the play as he drove Enron. In a tour-de-performance by Norbert Leo Butz (“Dirty Rotten Scoundrels”), he’s a business-school visionary who drinks his own Kool-Aid and loses touch with reality — along with any kind of moral compass.
Skilling and math-geek CFO Andy Fastow (Stephen Kunken) devise the shadow companies that will artificially inflate Enron’s stock. Even with 20/20 hindsight, it’s hard not to get caught up in the suspense, especially as we track the ups and downs of ENE, Enron’s NYSE symbol, on a ticker tape. Anthony Ward’s set, all stainless steel, glass and neon, suggests the oppressive opacity of a corporate building.
Skilling’s main rival is the head of one of the company’s units, Claudia Roe (Marin Mazzie), inspired by Enron’s Rebecca Mark. Roe wants to build actual power plants, and she plays the game as hard as the men around her. They shun her because they see her priorities as antiquated, not because she lacks the necessary cojones.
Indeed, Roe is at ease with the testosterone-fueled one-upmanship that drives Enron’s infectious, anything-is-possible intensity. It all looks like great fun, which Prebble and Goold never shy from showing.
The playwright makes risk management as entertaining as pulp fiction, and the director isn’t above visual puns. Enron created “joint energy development investments” (JEDI) in California, so he stages that state’s blackouts as a lightsaber battle.
Eventually, facts caught up with the games. The shell companies weren’t real, unlike the employees who lost their jobs and life savings. There was outrage, trials, Senate hearings.
A few years after Enron’s collapse, the country blindly embraced subprime mortgages. With a bit of luck, we’ll get a good song-and-dance out of it.
elisabeth.vincentelli
@nypost.com