Theater Review: An Epic Play about Failed Financial Titans

The Lehman Trilogy

Written by Stefano Massini (adapted by Ben Power)

Directed by Sam Mendes

Starring Simon Russell Beale, Adam Bodley, and Ben Miles

Park Avenue Armory, NYC

March 27, 2019

This epic play begins with the dissolution of the financial services giant Lehman Brothers during the crash of 2007. The epic play that follows spans the nearly 200 years of the Lehman family in the USA. The play was written in 2012 by Italian Stefano Massini (b. 1975) as a radio play, and lasts over three hours. It was translated into 24 languages and performed all over Europe, but only received its English language debut in London in 2018. This was the American premiere, benefiting from the vast performance space of the Armory and the attention of the famed director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Skyfall).

The play begins with boxes being moved as the company collapses in 2007, then tells the story leading up to that collapse. The playwright uses several meta-themes over the long play, including how the brothers creatively benefitted from calamities (burning Alabama cotton fields, the Civil War, the 1929 Wall Street crash) by thinking about and offering what other businesses would next need to recover. Was this crass opportunism, or the best of American enterprise that improves us all? Both sides of this argument are presented, but the crash of the company at the end perhaps provides the author’s final judgement. The play’s idea of American business of humble immigrant-striving origins leading inevitably to the sins of the modern corporation are an easy theme to put out there, but perhaps this is a bit unfair in this particular case, since the last actual Lehman to manage the company died in 1969. In the end the play is an imperfect allegory, striving for the same message and scope as the filmed Godfather trilogy.  

The play’s structure is striking in its minimalist resources to portray a vast canvas. Three talented British actors portray six different Lehman brothers plus their rapacious successors, plus other subsidiary characters (including children and wives). The three actors take on different voices and affects, and are dazzlingly virtuosic as they keep the characters separate, including a few infants and children. An odd thing about the play is that the characters speak both as themselves and as narrators, sometimes narrating their own lives, sometimes the lives of other characters. This flipping back and forth between dialogue and narration, sometimes in mid-sentence, reminded me of postmodern writing, but the narration never enters the realm of interior monologue like Shakespeare or O’Neal. At least 50% of the lines are narration, and this had a way of making the play into more of a documentary (or, I guess a docudrama).

Dramatically, I missed elements of personal motivation and details about the characters’ lives. The play was most effective in the first act, when the playwright took more time to allow us to see the humanity and personality of the immigrating brothers. This declined as the play went on and the later company leaders became less sympathetic. But evil can be compelling too, as Shakespeare knew. It seemed that the playwright was less interested in portraying these men, who seemed fascinating, than in using them as props to make his points about the downfall of the American dream. I suspect that this is why the play has been so popular initially with European audiences, as continental artists have long sought to portray the complexity of US history via allegories or digestible stories like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, or Lars von Trier’s Dogville. But the best of these, like the Godfather films, convey both the American story and the personal triumphs and tragedies of the participants. This emotional connection did not occur in The Lehman Trilogy. I wish the playwright had done less chronologic narration and details of the financial transactions, and more interior monologue, or dialogue that better pointed out the character of these men.

The entire play occurred in a glass box, looking like the penthouse of a NYC tower. This was visually impressive, but made the actors seem like animals in a cage, and detracted from any human connection with them. The huge backdrop was a semicircular film screen occupying the whole stage, which ingeniously morphed from ocean (during the Lehman’s immigration) to cotton fields (where the brothers made their fortune selling to Alabama plantation owners) to civil war battlefields (where they profited after the way in helping the South to rebuild) to the NYC cityscape. I was dazzled by the acting and epic scale of The Lehman Trilogy but in the end unpersuaded by its allegory, and bothered by the use of the family as puppets or props to portray a political story. Compelling characters can co-exist alongside political drama, and in fact amplify the author’s points. That was missing here, despite all the flashiness.