"Greed: The Tale of Enron," Rebecca Davis Dance Co., Fri., Jan. 30, Prince Music Theater

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"Greed: The Tale of Enron," Rebecca Davis Dance Co., Fri., Jan. 30, Prince Music Theater

POSTED: Monday, February 2, 2009, 6:57 PM

Filed Under: Arts Dance

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It sounds like a concept hatched by stoned new agers, or maybe a drunken joke: the story of Enron, whose nefarious business strategies became the most meteoric rise-and-fall tale in corporate history, told through interpretive dance.

But if anyone in Philly was going to do it, it had to be the Rebecca Davis Dance Co., which seems to have a knack for adapting subjects that don’t lend themselves to dance into dance performances. “Greed: The Tale of Enron” was an ambitious and difficult project from the moment of conception, and the full house owed itself in no small part to the curiosity of the audience that wanted to see just how in the world this would be pulled off. At its best, the show is powerfully innovative and spot on in its depiction of corporate malfeasance, exploding with the mania that consumed the company’s villains. At its worst, it’s a jumbled, confusing narrative, a reminder of just how limited the language of ballet can be.

If you don’t know the story of Enron, don’t expect “Greed” to teach you. While the program offers a skeletal story of the energy company that was poised to become the largest in the world and was brought down by lying about its earnings, the show is mainly meant to dramatize what people already know. To ensure the audience doesn’t become completely lost — and to convey the media sensation of the whole debacle — static reproductions of radio newscasts boom from the sound system, and this is how “Greed” begins.

Find out how "Greed: The Tale of Enron" ends after the jump. (Yes, Clifford Baxter kills himself.)

A projection of the Supreme Court displays on the semi-transparent stage screen as we hear about Enron CEO Jeff Skilling’s plea for innocence. The Supreme Court brilliantly turns into the iconic tilted E and floats in front of Skilling (Troy Macklin) as he walks onstage. Enron employee Rebecca Mark (Vanessa Woods) joins him, and the newscast turns into grungy techno as Mark and Skilling flowingly shake each other’s hands while they move up the stage.

As a narrative, “Greed” tends to falter. The dancing itself is always masterfully executed and mostly imaginatively choreographed. But here, Mark and Skilling appear as co-conspirators instead of the rivals that they are. In “Greed,” it’s repeatedly difficult to determine if the characters are joyous or somber. And it’s most difficult when Davis uses ballet instead of a modern style. Was that pirouette expressing greed, or was it expressing conflict? Classical ballet also generally looks anachronistic here, a show in which A Perfect Circle broods from the speakers and a horde of suited corporate legions dominate the stage. It’s confusing why Davis took certain movements of a modern story, put them to modern music and then used an archaic physical language to convey them.

The best parts of “Greed” come during modern dance movements, and ironically, the best parts come in what some would expect to be the hardest parts to interpret, like moments of accounting fraud. After the Skilling/Mark opening, Kenneth Lay (Ian Dodge), donning a flamboyant gold vest and tie under his suit, struts to front center and exudes Lay’s inner prowess. (In one of many funny internal moments, I thought of the actual late Lay — grayed, bald and stout, and nothing like the Jude Law-doppelganger Dodge — being this nimble and dazzling in the boardroom.) Behind him, nameless employees tinged in gold light shimmy back and forth over E-branded tables and then bow down to Lay. Davis does well in showing the fervent devotion toward the company’s higher-ups.

She does equally well when she’s showing the unbridled money lust of Enron’s board members and executives. In a particularly striking scene in which Lay and Skilling present their strategy to the Board of Directors, Clifford Baxter — the guilty conscience of Enron who eventually takes his own life — sits motionless at the board table while everyone else loses their minds to blaring, dark electronic rock, throwing their hands in their air and signing off on the company’s practices.

There are enough of these brilliant scenes to make up for some god-awful instances elsewhere in “Greed,” and Joshua Schulman is masterful enough with his lighting that there’s at least something visually captivating at any given point. But it seems Davis tried to tell too much of the story and fell into peripheral territory, like the love story between Skilling and Rebecca Carter (Lauren Putty), or the use of Rebecca Mark as a main character. Unfortunately, including these frivolities meant omitting the entire real-life ending. At the end, Skilling is nervous, Baxter kills himself, and that’s it. No trial, no Senate hearings, nothing about the second half of the story. Which is too bad because it’s all so important. That, and I would have liked to see Barbara Boxer prance around onstage.

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