I’m no numbers guy, and I’m oh so very far away from being a money guy, too. But as explained by British playwright Lucy Prebble in her 2009 dark comedy Enron, the financial maneuvers that led to the biggest bankruptcy in American history aren’t all that hard to understand.
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What’s a little harder to understand is why the Enron brain trust didn’t see what they were letting themselves—and loads of innocent victims—in for when they first decided to finesse the difference between real and conceptual money. After all, these were the notorious “smartest guys in the room,” and the potential for disaster should’ve been fairly obvious to anyone with a gram of foresight. But there, too, the answer is implicit in the question: Skilling, Fastow, and the rest ignored the downside because their enormous self-regard didn’t admit the possibility of a situation they couldn’t handle. They were lords of the spreadsheet, too brilliant and agile to fail.
Skilling, in particular, appears to have been a picture-in-the-dictionary example of the pride that goeth before a fall. It’s said he told a Harvard Business School interviewer that he (Skilling, not the interviewer) was “fucking smart,” and in Bret Tuomi‘s engagingly icky performance he comes across as a vulgar, egotistical pudge a la Newt Gingrich, with a sadistic streak and a Silicon Valley-esque sense of superiority.
Through 4/15: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, also 4/5, 8:30 PM, TimeLine Theatre Company, Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall Theatre, 615 W. Wellington, 773-281-8463, timelinetheatre.com, $32-$42
