Epics typically involve tragedies. How can they not?
While the arc of history may bend toward justice — and at times, that “may” feels mighty wobbly — the cadence of history visits catastrophe on so many in the meantime. Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” about the siblings who founded the Lehman Brothers investment bank, is epic in length (it runs a hair over three hours; Massini’s initial version was closer to eight) and Homeric sensibility.
While its peaks are thrilling, one can argue the deepest tragedies of the story aren’t borne by the people onstage. The Tony-winning drama is receiving a prodigious and deeply satisfying production, the final one of the Denver Center Theater Company’s 2023-24 season. (It closes June 2.)
Adapted by British playwright Ben Power with the creative input of director Sam Mendes, it does not disappoint. The play fascinates and perhaps it will rile some audience members for its too sympathetic (or so it seems) account of the formation of capitalism that is so entwined with the country’s role as a global force. I count myself among the wowed and the riled.
The play begins with an infamous end. Audio can be heard of news reports on the demise of the Lehman Brothers investment house; a janitor with a trash bin makes his way across the stage. It is September 2008. Along with the collapse of Lehman came the buying of the equally market-battered Merrill Lynch by Bank of America. The one-two punches ushered in the Great Recession.
Breaking news could not begin to capture (or anticipate) the multitudes who would suffer because of Wall Street’s economic collapse. The homes! The jobs! The company bailouts! Those stories are encompassed if repressed in this robust and moving immigrant saga.
And so, “The Lehman Trilogy” begins its sweeping history in earnest with an immigrant from Rimpar, Bavaria, landing in New York City.
“Baruch HaShem,” says the man on the stage wearing a black frock coat and shiny shoes. Heyum — “son of a cattle merchant, a circumcised Jew with only one piece of luggage” — becomes Henry, renamed by a port official. Baruch HaShem.
The Hebrew prayer speaks to the religious practices the three protagonists observe. There will be recitations of Hebrew — for the Sabbath and Hannukah, of the Kaddish and more — but religious observances wane with each new generation and each bold shift in business until Shiva has been winnowed from the seven days of mourning for the first brother to die in America to three minutes for the last of the original trio as the third generation of Lehmans makes its mark. But we get ahead of ourselves.
Henry (Matthew Boston) is followed to America by Emanuel (Sasha Roiz). Henry has moved to and opened a shop in Montgomery, Ala. Younger sibling Mayer (Tasso Feldman), who has been given the nickname Spud by the slightly bullying Emanuel, arrives. He was sent, he tells us, to act as the peacekeeper, the negotiator between “The Arm” (Emanuel) and “The Head” (Henry, who is “always right”).
“The Lehman Trilogy” unfolds like fabric fluttering before us, the characters telling their stories. (On the page, the script resembles verse.) The actors who portray Henry (Matthew Boston), Emanuel (Sasha Roiz) and Mayer Lehman (Tasso Feldman), and as many as 100 other characters, ace the drama’s intricate timing, both physical and verbal. The show is often funny.
Henry, Emanuel and Mayer recount their arrival in the U.S., and their establishment of successive businesses, first in Montgomery and then New York City. It’s an oral history about a family that builds a fabric business into a dynasty and, in doing so, also builds the nation (trains, petroleum, banking … so much banking). It’s also a poem, an ode, a memory play and a ghost story in which the actors who play the original brothers remain vividly on stage in new roles, among them a factory owner, a tightrope walker, a three-card monte grifter, and, most amusingly, the women each brother courts and marries:Mayer’s son Herbert, Emanuel’s scion, Philip (as well as Philip’s son Robert), but also two immigrant fathers. One is Greek with a diner in Kearney, Neb. The other is Hungarian with a lamp-making concern in New York. Their toddler sons who’ll grow to be two men who will scale the heights of the investment firm are trader and partner Lewis Glucksman and chairman and CEO Pete Peterson.
It sounds like a lot to track. Yet it flows with the clarity of an icy mountain creek.
At first, the Montgomery shop sells fabric and suits. Its sign says “Henry Lehman, Fabric and Suits.” When Emanuel and Mayer arrive, the sign changes. Henry decides they should sell farm goods along with fabrics. They do. The sign gets revised: Lehman Brothers.
When a fire destroys the cotton fields of the nearby plantations, Henry sees an opportunity to buy and sell raw cotton — “Alabama Gold.” And Mayer sees a way to extend credit to the plantation owners and make money doing so. Emanuel visits a textile factory owner who Mayer nicknames “Perfect Hands” (has he ever raised a finger in work?). The sign gets a new paint job. One of the play’s best winking gestures, the continuous revision of the sign, reflects the growth of the business.
By the end of Act I, two of the brothers will join up in New York City. Henry will be mourned with the same rituals he would have been honored with had he died in Bavaria: Emanuel and Mayer sit shiva. The shop stays closed. By the end of Act II, Black Thursday has just happened, and stockbroker suicides are mounting. Even so, Lehman Brothers is still standing but changes again. Act II will take the audience with momentum from that dark day that ushered in the Great Depression to the global investment bank’s shuttering and ledge of the Great Recession.
With its spare set (by Reid Thompson) and the one-two bravado of lighting (Jiyoun Chang) and music-sound (Palmer Heffernan) design, “The Lehman Trilogy” is elegantly lean and epically evocative. Yet, the play presents challenges. It’s telling — and rather damning — that the hardworking Lehmans of Montgomery start to accelerate their wealth when they begin buying raw cotton from nearby plantations and selling it first to “Perfect Hands” and later to Northern merchants for a variety of textiles. (In the ashes of the Civil War, Montgomery denizen Dr. Beauchamp says to a resistant Mayer, “Surely you knew it could not last, Mr. Mayer. Everything that was built here was built on a crime.”)
When Henry asks for Babette’s hand in marriage, he describes his and his brothers’ newfangled approach to business to her father. “We are middlemen.” That echo would already suggest a problem were that the end of it, but the actual Lehmans enslaved people, and this elision in the play suggests a blind spot or an outright dodge — one I’m comfortable holding Power and Mendes accountable for. (There’s an illuminating interview with the pair conducted with American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage available on YouTube.)
Additionally, there comes a moment in Emanuel’s early visit to New York City when the names of well-known banking families are mentioned — “the jangling of coins, the packs of bills, and the Jewish names. Rothchild. Sachs. Goldman … Emanuel walks amongst them, he holds his chin up, even though he knows he’s no one … .”
This is among the scenes that have given rise to concerns about the play being anti-Semitic, since the trope of the Jewish banker has been a staple of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. Can a play that so well celebrates the Lehmans, their Judaism and their contribution to the building of America also be anti-Semitic? My answer is “yes” but that’s something for you to decide, if you go. And you should. For all its moral lacunae, it is often exquisite and utterly thought-provoking.
In a profile for the Financial Times, playwright Massini shows a visiting reporter his home gym, where he often writes. “I need to write while moving,” he says. “If I am sitting in a chair, stuck in front of a monitor, I can only write words without movement … .”
Director Margot Bordelon gets this. She conducts her players across the at times spinning, in-the-round stage like a choreographer. The play’s energy feels unabated —an achievement of the writing and acting, too. “The Lehman Trilogy” is measured yet never lags.
Playing Bobby Lehman, Feldman does a mad, mad, mad, mad dance worthy of Studio 54’s famed excess but also Wall Street’s nature. It’s breakneck and macabre, thrilling and concerning. It heralds exuberance but also hints at demise.
Lisa Kennedy is a Denver-based freelance writer who specializes in film and theater.
IF YOU GO
“The Lehman Trilogy”: Written by Stefano Massini. Adapted by Ben Power. Directed by Margot Bordelon. Featuring Matthew Boston, Tasso Feldman and Sasha Roiz. At the Kilstrom Theatre in the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, 14th and Curtis streets, through June 2. For tickets and info: denvercenter.org. 303-893-4100.
