On Theater: Why Enron tanked on Broadway

I was rushing out of the house when I got an e-mail request from BBC Radio. It was several days after "Enron," the big British hit, opened April 28 to mostly mixed or negative reviews on Broadway. The BBC wanted to discuss the Yank rejection of Lucy Prebble's play about the '90s rise and the 2001 collapse of the mega-energy Texas company. Since I wasn't going to be around for the live broadcast, I regretfully had to decline.

Wow, did I ever miss a story.

Britain's inconclusive May 6 elections may have catapulted that country into political chaos. For pure international theater, however, it would be hard to get more dramatic than the name-calling that began in the English press after "Enron" failed to get any major nominations for Tony Awards and closed last Sunday at a loss of $3.6 million.

Michael Billington, critic of the Guardian, said Americans are too dumb to understand the piece and Broadway is irrelevant to "serious theater." In the Telegraph, Jerry DeGroot came to the alarming conclusion that, "Since 9/11, the insular Americans have become terribly sensitive to criticism," especially "when the criticism is delivered with an English accent."

Motivations are being questioned. At least one major New York critic has been called "obtuse." We're all chauvinistic, aesthetically conservative and xenophobic - a hilarious accusation in the same week David Benedict practically crowed in the London Times about London works sweeping 28 Tony nominations. The headline? "Britain Rules the Tonys."

I found the fanciful multimedia staging of "Enron" technically ingenious, but old news in terms of content. Still, I am surprised that director Rupert Goold and star Norbert Leo Butz were left out of lists that include far lesser achievements.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg.com's Jeremy Gerard dug out the best explanation yet on the quick fall of "Enron." Jeffrey Richards, the play's lead producer, says it's Goldman Sachs' fault. "We opened with a sizable advance," he says. "But we ate into it during previews. Then the Goldman Sachs hearings began. Suddenly we were competing with reality." As ludicrous as that sounds, I think he is at least partially right.

A gay controversy

Kristin Chenoweth didn't get a nomination, either. But she is currently the most popular actress in New York.

And she deserves to be. Hers was the first, most visible and arguably the loudest voice to be raised against a blinkered and backward essay in the May 10 issue of Newsweek, which she described as "horrendously homophobic."

The article is titled "Straight Jacket." In it, author Ramin Setoodeh argues that openly gay actors are not convincing as straight characters. He singled out Sean Hayes, Chenoweth's romantic co-star in "Promises, Promises," as being "wooden" and "weird" - calling his sexuality "the big pink elephant in the room." (Hayes, incidentally, did get a Tony nomination.)

Setoodeh also talks about Jonathan Groff, the young heartthrob (and Tony nominee) of "Spring Awakening," who recently came out and now seems too "queeny" to play Lea Michele's boyfriend on "Glee." And, he added, "Cynthia Nixon was married to a man when she originated the role of Miranda on 'Sex and the City.' "

As Chenoweth says, "Give me a break! We're actors first, whether we're playing prostitutes, baseball players or the Lion King. Audiences come to theater to go on a journey. It's a character, and it's called acting."

Needless to say, Setoodeh's days have not been serene since he wrote and she responded. In the current Newsweek, he reports "a lot of vicious attacks," especially on the Internet, which he says oversimplified his point and turned his article into "a straw man for homophobia and hurt in the world." Obviously, the vehemence made him feel he had to describe himself - gay, American, born in Texas, of Iranian descent.

"I was hoping to start a dialogue that would be thoughtful . . . I don't hate gay people or myself."

He asks, "If an actor of the stature of George Clooney came out of the closet today, would we still accept him as a heterosexual leading man?" It's a provocative question, but one that skips over the dangerous selectivity in his original statements. He says nothing about the effectiveness of Nathan Lane as the romantic Gomez in "The Addams Family," or Cheyenne Jackson as the dreamboat in "Finian's Rainbow."

Whatever Setoodeh's intentions, he risks setting back all the free-range casting freedoms won when Cherry Jones became Broadway's first out-lesbian star. (In the fall, Jones plays a famously respectable prostitute in "Mrs. Warren's Profession.")

I'm not sure how openly gay actors would be accepted playing romantic straights in the movies. I do know, however, that the theater moved beyond the prisons of limited imaginations years ago. If Setoodeh really looked around, he would know that, too.