For most Duke students, the Enron scandal is something we hear mentioned in passing—a reference brought up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the completion of a metaphor when something involving money goes horribly wrong. To people of our generation, Enron wasn’t quite long enough ago to be learned about in history class, but happened just early enough in our lives to be something we don’t remember well.
However, when Duke’s Department of Theater Studies premieres Lucy Prebble’s play Enron this Thursday, the facts, impacts and absurdities of the Enron scandal will be aired out in a new, refreshing and exciting way, showing that Enron was more than just a financial hullabaloo but also defined the stories of some of the most brilliant minds of a generation.
Talya Klein, a Duke alumnus who has returned to do her first show at Duke since graduating in 2002, directs Duke’s production of Enron. Klein has worked around the world since her graduation, winning many awards in the process.
“It’s exciting,” Klein said. “I never imagined that I would come back and direct a show, but it’s great to tap in with a new generation of theater students.”
Ironically, the “new generation” that Klein describes were barely kids when the Enron scandal unfolded. It was in October of 2001 that Enron’s stock plummeted to a mere fraction of its prior value, and the shady financial loopholes that the company abused to mislead their investors came to light.
The Enron scandal was something that only adults would know much about, making Duke students even more readily impressionable by the depiction of the events that occurred.
Ben Hatt, who plays the lead role of Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling, said that the play is particularly important for our generation, precisely “because it takes place in this weird space where we were too young [to understand it] but it’s too recent for history books.”
However, that isn’t to say that this play is just a moving diorama of the events that occurred. Klein feels that “the adults who come to this play, who were really present when this all happened, can learn a lot from seeing what our actors make of this event and how they see it and interpret it.”
Enron is more than just a retelling—it looks into the events of the scandal and draws out meaning, demonstrating how intelligence and ambition can lead to disaster when unchecked by morality, and highlighting how our perception of facts can be twisted to distort reality.
Viewing the Enron scandal through this lens reveals that a simple chain of events can be construed into a sweeping discussion of human action and morality. While this could be overwhelming, Enron leavens the story with comedy and absurdity.
“What’s interesting is you can’t tell the difference between the ridiculous, absurd things that happen in the play and the real things that actually happened,” said Klein, “Some of the lines in this play were actually said, and are on the record."
This choice by Prebble encourages us to break down the disbelief that may otherwise come from a play where puppet dinosaurs lurk in the shadows at the edges of the set. Rather than trying to view the play as 100 percent accurate, or alternatively as being a pure artistic interpretation, the blurring of the edge between fact and fiction allows viewers to take the events on stage and see how their significance adds to the themes of the show and reflects broader truths of human ambition, emotion, and consequence.
However, the transition into this head space isn’t naturally comfortable.
Set designer Tilly Grimes noted that “finance isn’t a natural conversation that we’re in,” so using it as a stage for this broad discussion is difficult. To alleviate this barrier, Grimes redesigned the entirety of Sheafer theater and created a raised stage for the set in order to evoke the feeling of a “high school auditorium," and thereby make the play seem like “a commemorative history project.”
“That familiarity hopefully will let you engage with the story, and engage with how it’s being told,” explained Grimes, saying that “it helps us access a conversation” by emphasizing the barrier between reality and a true story versus distorted perception and the retelling of previous events.
Klein, Hatt, and Grimes were all quick to emphasize that this play bears far more significance than just promoting an understanding of what happened in the past; the events of Enron carry particular significance to Duke students, especially in the present economic climate we live in.
“As Duke students, you’re the best and the brightest in the country, and you’re going to be the future leaders,” says Klein. “What makes this play interesting is that it’s asking, ‘How do you balance your obligation to innovation and personal success to how it’s affecting your community and whose lives you’re affecting?’”
“This is an important event to back into the educational sphere, especially at Duke University,” added Hatt. “Seeing this play, doing this play… it offers good food for thought before we go out and interact with and become parts of financial companies.”
More than just a warning of what might happen if you are caught, Enron is a call to future generations of bright minds like Skilling to think with a sense of community, obligation, and ethics, rather than merely trying to make money or leave a name for themselves.
And yet, at the end of the day, Grimes says that we are left thinking, “Skilling, all these guys—none of them are really ‘bad guys.’”
Enron really says just that—you don’t have to be a bad person to get caught up in bad things and reap the consequences. So, while not ever seeking to insinuate that we may be ‘bad guys,’ Klein’s production of Enron challenges Duke students to be conscious of the effects of their actions, and to be aware of and try to improve the mark that our ambitious goals will leave on the world.
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