The Lehman Trilogy

This Saturday, I went to my first live theater since February 2020. I got a KN95 mask and a ticket that turned out to be on the far end of the front row—partly to limit how many people were around me, and partly because if I’m going to pay for the cheap seats, I’d rather be close with an occluded view (for a talky play) than way up in the balcony. (The couple next to me came in and the husband said—these seats are TERRIBLE! My dude. It says obstructed view when you buy the ticket.)

And for that honor, I chose…The Lehman Trilogy.

It’s a three and a half hour, three-actor play about the history of the Lehman family and the founding of Lehman Brothers. Or, if I’m not the target audience of this, I don’t know who is. Seriously—the theater was 90% full, and this has been running since 2018 (pandemic excepted) and I don’t know why other people would go to see it.

I give it a B-, and that’s entirely for saving me the trouble of reading a book about Lehman Bros. I’ve already read a lot of finance history, so learning about how this firm slots in was mildly interesting. And that’s about all the plus side?

Short version: actors doing THE MOST doesn’t necessarily mean it’s GOOD. I mean. I could tell this was hard. But to what effect?

Longer version: There was no theme. Like, why are you telling me about the Lehman family? Closest thing to a theme is that fathers get replaced by sons, and as you age, you become less relevant. Which—this is a family that made its fortune off of SLAVERY and the theme you chose was aging sucks?

It’s a three-act play (two intermissions and you better believe I was out of my seat and into the bathroom like a shot both times) structured around three generations of Lehmans. The first act held together the most, about the original three brothers. But it’s structured like a standard rags-to-riches immigrant story (the woman behind me, at intermission, said, “What a great immigrant story!”). It has montages where their business expands, etc. But—this is their business:

They started as fabric merchants in Montgomery, Alabama. A series of plantation fires devastated the local cotton crop. So they sold the plantation owners the tools and seeds they needed to rebuild for a cut of the cotton. From there, they went on to be cotton brokers, between dozens of slave plantations and northern mills. Basically, they engineered being the economic benefactors of the slave economy without having to own slaves themselves. What an amazing immigrant story!!

The first act ends with the Civil War, yes, but more from a perspective of the remaining two Lehmans not knowing how to function in the new, post-war economy.

Though the play includes the whole slave economy thing, it doesn’t comment on it at all, and the narrative structure makes us empathize with the Lehmans and their success. It being a three-person play only adds to this. There’s barely room to mention people that are not the Lehman brothers, and even as the actors are playing various other characters, because they are mainly playing Lehmans, you are ALWAYS looking at and thinking about Lehmans. This choice—I’m guessing born out of a combination of budget and bravado—entirely erases any other stakeholders from the narrative.

So as it progresses, you learn about them being railroad barons and investors in tobacco, and surviving the 1929 stock market crash by ruthlessly throwing other banks under the bus. And always you are only ever looking at the Lehmans, so there is no consideration at all given to any sort of statement about capitalism and exploitation, even when the narrative metaphor of Lehman Bros. as middle men, just like overseers are middle men between owners and slaves, is RIGHT FUCKING THERE.

Then the last act just sort of…peters out? The last Lehman to be involved in the firm died in 1969. So since the play is about the Lehman family, and the themes are about fathers and sons, they don’t really have anything to say about the eventual collapse of the firm. They gloss over an ENORMOUS amount of history and multiple sea changes in finance and don’t say anything at all about the causes of Lehman Bros. failing in 2008, just sort of skip ahead to it as a conclusion, even though it has no thematic tie to the rest of the work. I mean, it seems so obvious to have some kind of theme of arrogance and folly and the failure of Lehman Bros., but they don’t even hint at that. By the time we got to the death of the last Lehman, I just wanted them to end the play—I’d been sitting for a long time in a restrictive mask, and doing another half hour of extremely abbreviated summary was tiring.

The other main theme of the work was about AMERICA and about how subsequent generations lose their connection to the home country and become AMERICANS. They literally say that a few times about characters—that there’s nothing of Germany in them, they are AMERICAN. There’s a recurring motif of shiva, where the first Lehman to die, they sit shiva for a week (side note—there were enough Jews in Montgomery, AL in 1855 that you could do a proper shiva and not starve to death?), then for three days, then for three minutes.

The problem with this theme is that this play was written by an Italian (originally in Italian and five hours long—woof) and is presented by the National Theatre, with three British actors. I suppose it’s a blessing the whole thing is in third person, cause they just speak with their British accents except for rare occasions when they pop into atrocious American accents.

But to sit in New York City and have three Brits lecture me about what AMERICA is and what NEW YORK is was a bit much.

So that all seems like it should rate less than a B-? But I did enjoy being in a theater again, and with a live audience (the biggest laugh line came when a character said something about mask protests in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic).

When I told a friend about seeing this, she said her reaction on hearing about it was, “Why do we need to talk about these people?” And yeah. Yup.