Speaking of state of the nation plays, I saw ENRON last night after hearing that it is closing at the end of the weekend. After reading Brantley’s review and seeing the Tony nominations and weekly grosses, I can understand the decision to do so. There were very high expectations for this show to do well on Broadway and it appears that the money and the Times did not follow those expectations.
I, however, had a great time and found it to be an exciting, yet bizarre, piece of multi-media theatre. As someone who was not really paying attention to “business” when Enron collapsed, I was especially impressed with how well the show told the story, made it dramatic (almost Greek–9/11 as deus ex machina anyone?) and explained what everyone did at the company. The first act was a little too episodic for my tastes, but I liked what was done with the dance sequences once I got used to them. Norbert Leo Butz as Jeffrey Skilling was great from start to finish and the use of lighting and sound was very impressive. By the end of the play, I was a fan of this outsider’s view of American business from a city that has its own share of financial woes.
Of course, previous knowledge of the show closing made me examine the play more carefully in an attempt to reconcile why this play probably shouldn’t have been transferred to Broadway (I think BAM may have been a safer bet, the play needed a more intimate venue to pack the necessary punch). Theatre in London tends to succeed (especially recently) when it exposes society in a negative light. Jerusalem and Posh are great recent examples (see previous posts) of plays that show an unflattering mirror to society but have been critically and financially rewarded. That’s not to say that plays need to be dark to succeed, just that these plays seem to do better commercially in London than in New York. Add to that the fact that the play casts America and the 90′s bubble in a negative light and a lot of paying audience members don’t want to see it. And certainly don’t want to shell out hundreds of dollars to be told something they don’t want to hear. Americans don’t wallow as much as Brits do. And Brits certainly like ribbing Americans every so often.
It seems like a good time to break out my go-to difference between America and Britain. We haven’t come to terms with losing our power yet, while Britain lost an entire empire in the past hundred years. And while it might be an oversimplication to equate that to the differences in commercial theatre, I think for this particular show (and this particular theatre season) it seems quite apt. We’d much rather see uplifting stories about overcoming adversity or fantasy worlds than an indictment of bad behavior that continues not in Houston, but just on the other end of the island of Manhattan. Brits have been dealing with their nation’s loss of power for years, so a play about it doesn’t feel like a slap in the face anymore.
An exception to this might be Bruce Norris’ work, but it hasn’t quite made the leap to Broadway yet so I can’t crunch the numbers as easily.
