Playwright: Lucy Prebble. At: Timeline Theatre Company at Baird Hall, 615 W. Wellington Ave.. Phone: 773-281-8463 or www.timelinetheatre.com; $32-$42. Runs through: April 15
Minutes into the office party that opens the play, new operations manager Jeffrey Skilling declares that "people don't understand how this works""this" being the mechanics of high finance. He is correct, and this is what enabled the real-life Enron corporation to swindle millions of bewildered stockholders out of billions of dollars by means of a shell-and-pea game as primitive as the kind played on curbs and subways. How, then, do you recount its history without likewise losing your audience in a morass of arcane jargon?
British playwright Lucy Prebble looks to Shakespeare's tragedies to solve the problem, translating the events that made "Enron" synonymous with fat-cat fraud into a fable of a flawed hero endowed with too many brains and too much ambition, and, as such, vulnerable to the intoxicating lure of gaming fever and numbers with too many zeros. Unlike his peers, however, he DOES understand how it all works.
At TimeLine Theatre, it works like a casinoPrebble's metaphor for free-market economicsa carnival replete with barbershop-harmony warblers (representing the stock analysts), ventriloquists (the accountants), tableaux vivants (the lawyers), side-show freaks (the Lehman Brothers) and nursery-rhyme characters like the Three Blind Mice (the Enron board members). When the chief financial officer names his fictional enterprises "raptors"after the popular sci-fi film, Jurassic Parkhe soon acquires a menagerie of greenback-chomping dinosaurs. An adrenaline-pumping tempo is maintained by video screens flashing the ever-fluctuating market quotes and a running score of visceral boxing-arena music. (At one point, an executive who engages in a free-for-all with a pack of traders is rewarded with a promotion.)
It's a circus, forged by a technical-design staff George Lucas himself might envy, but Rachel Rockwell's musical and stage combat directorial expertise renders its logistics always crisp and precise, even when executed at road-runner velocity, as the nine-actor ensemble zips through changes of scenery, costumes and masks with lightning agility. At the center of the dazzle is Bret Tuomi's brilliant portrayal of the power-drunk Skilling, whose eyes glow like a crocodile's as he revels in the gullibility of his inferiors. Even in defeat, he continues to deny wrongdoing, instead faulting the capitalist system that allows greed to triumph. Is he right? You've got until April 15ironically, the scheduled date of the show's closingto make up your mind.