The Guardian questions whether American audiences will be as receptive to the Lucy Prebble play as English ones.
Apparently there is doubt. The article discusses a brief recreation of 9/11, which is all well and good if you’re a Brit who didn’t have to ingest jet fuel on that fateful day, but perhaps New Yorkers might take a more sombre tone with that event.
Plus the big stars are not name-brands.
From my point of view, these aren’t the major problems with the play. Indeed, the hindrance to getting butts in chairs is that the economy in the USA doesn’t feel like a laughing matter. Just last summer, SEIU members picketed the homes of AIG executives. Oil executives were denigrated by no less than the President. People have an unfair and class-envy based hatred of executives right now.
My beliefs about the Enron executives are well known and I leave no room for doubt: with the exception of a very small group in the Global Finance group, they’re innocent. However, I know that many do not believe that. If they still hate Enron execs as much as they hate today’s whipping boy – insurance execs – I don’t expect the play to be as grand a success as it was in Britain.
That said, I still want tickets.
The problem with those people picketing the houses of the AIG executives in New York…is that the executives that really brought down the company were actually located a few miles away…….in LONDON, ENGLAND. That’s where the Global Finance…..er, uh…the AIG Financial Products division is located.
AIG and Enron actually have a lot in common in the way that both companies were brought down by a relatively small number of executives, and now everyone associated with them has to pay the price.
Also (and more importantly) in how the stories were covered in the media. As a person familier with the goings on at AIG, I can’t even begin to tell you how WRONG the media reported the whole AIG executive retreat “scandal” last year. Same with the retention bonuses, which were for the people trying to clean up the mess, not for the ones who created it.
It’s just frightening to see how WRONG the media reports a story that you have even a little inside knowledge of, as I’m sure you can relate to, Cara..
It makes you wonder if you can believe anything they say.
Well I like AIG. I find nothing they did unethical – they were people who earned the money that they were due. Good on them.
With Enron, there’s a lot of deep-seated belief about the so-called corruption of the company. Demonstrating that their opinion about the company is based on lies is no easy task, but it’s what I love to do so I will continue to do it. I don’t listen to the media about Enron because I’ve talked to the people, walked the halls, seen the documents. It just does not add up to “everyone in the company was guilty.”
I don’t think it is class envy really at all per say.
Even if you are the sort of person that has a visceral disdain of investment banks or other Wall Street types it isn’t really so comforting to watch them all toppling over in domino style.
The thing about massive financial earthquakes, landslides and so forth is it always brings out the torches and pitchforks in its wake.
Conspiratorial fear of plutocratic financial organizations always comes to the forefront when the gears get gummed.
Hitler, for instance, his outlook formed in the Weimar crucible of financial collapse, derived his anti-semitism as much from the historic association of Jews in positions of high finance as any other source. The Nazi campaign of racial extermination was an expression of the fear and conspiracy mongering theories surrounding bankers in the wake of hyperinflation.
It is human nature to look for a scapegoat in these sort of situations, and has been since the dawn of recorded history.
The sentiment is not envy however. It is more a sort of bitter paranoia.