Two Enrons for Rescuing Enron in Lucy Prebble’s Enron

Abstract

One of the rare plays of the twenty-first century to shed lights on the biggest financial crisis and eventual fall of the American energy corporate Enron in Houston- Texas, Enron (2009) is a portrait of real life painted musically by Lucy Prebble. The play delineates Enron’s rise from its early period with its founder Kenneth L. Lay and its president Jeffrey K. Skilling to its demise due to cunning schemes by Andrew S. Fastow, the chief financial officer, who creates LJM as a second Enron to swallow Enron’s enormous debts. ENRON was the seventh largest publicly traded business in the United States in 2000, larger than Sony, IBM, and Apple. One year later, the company was gone, the largest corporate collapse in US history - $35 billion in debt, 20,000 job losses, $1.2 billion in pension losses, and the demise of one of the Big Five accounting firms; three convictions, one fatal heart attack, a suicide, and the longest sentence ever imposed for corporate crime.

While broaching issues like lies, greed, deceit, fraud, and hubris, the focus of the study is that of examining social, ethical, and business behaviour of Enron’s founder partners and purposes behind creating LJM besides Enron to rescue Enron as depicted in the play following social Darwinian theories.