The Lehman Trilogy (Virtually) Delivers on Its Funding

Adam Godley, Simon Russell Beale, and Adrian Lester in The Lehman Trilogy.
Photo: Julieta Cervantes

The Lehman Trilogy has advance to Broadway with the parts of tragedy stuffed into its battered immigrant’s suitcase: spectacle, grandeur, give intention, sorrow. In its three and a half hours, it comprises a complete lot of deaths, three screaming nightmares, the Civil War, factual rot, the Depression, countless misunderstandings between fathers and sons, and — very rapid — the 2008 give intention of the Lehman Brothers monetary-services firm. Those are all heavy issues, and difficult to contend with. How can some degree out endure up under them for therefore long? It doesn’t moderately. There’s a sense at the discontinue of this atmospheric point out, stunning and intoxicating because it customarily is, of a mighty steel beam bending out of appropriate — all its energy can’t scurry to this point unsupported.

When The Lehman Trilogy turned into as soon as closing in New York, it turned into as soon as at the colossal Park Avenue Armory, one among the few venues that would possibly perchance maybe well make a Broadway dwelling seem runt by comparability. On the Nederlander, audiences don’t to find the Armory’s gull’s-mediate behold, nonetheless it indubitably’s well price the (rather) tight quarters to to find shut to the Lehmans themselves — the portion’s three stars Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Adrian Lester. The trio aren’t upright Lehmans, in point of fact. They play everybody within the point out’s 154-twelve months span, from squalling babies (Godley has a substantial squall), flirtatious maidens, stern plantation owners, heartbroken doctors, railroad magnates, and wild-eyed greed-is-dazzling commodities merchants. Director Sam Mendes builds a engaging production spherical them, as though he’s atmosphere jewels. The uncommon likelihood to seem upright one among these men develop is price the price of admission. All three together — heartbreaking Beale and wall-shaking Lester and the living lightning trudge Godley — is a guess that would possibly now not advance again.

Earlier than The Lehman Trilogy turned into as soon as a play, it turned into as soon as a poem. Stefano Massini’s original Qualcosa sui Lehman is written in verse, prankish and complex, an narrative about the beginning and transformation and decline of the Lehman Brothers firm. The structure of the book rests on the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, returning to moments when the Lehmans mourn every other (letting their beards grow long, greeting company) and concluding with generations of ghostly Lehmans sitting shiva for the firm itself. A master of the ritualistic, Massini involves dialogue and even references to staging and choreography; it’s optimistic why theater folks fancy Mendes and the creator Ben Energy were enthusiastic to adapt it.

On stage, the Trilogy takes situation in a Mies van de Rohe cube: a tumbler-walled situation of industrial, complete with conference table and shrimp reception space, a replica of what Halls of Energy regarded fancy in 2008. A janitor tidies up as he listens to a radio, which is breathlessly reporting the sudden give intention of Lehman Brothers. When he closes up, a particular person appears to be like — Henry Lehman, conducted by Beale dressed in an extended dark coat and dapper white beard. It’s 1844, and Lehman is collected Heyum Lehmann, having upright stepped onto the dock after immigrating from Bavaria. He shakes pretty.

Per chance it’s the emotion

or maybe, after a month and half at sea,

upright standing collected, on dry land:

No longer rocking!

is mute.

Nevertheless with out warning Lehman will shake the Outdated skool World from his name and European dirt from his shoes, and scurry south to Alabama.

There his brothers Emmanuel (Lester) and Mayer (Godley) join him, and the three originate a cloth industry in response to low-imprint cotton. After important laborious work (and a few unmentioned-by-the-play enslaved labor), their industry changes: from acting as simple cloth merchants they change into cotton brokers; then they emerge from the Civil War as bankers and financiers in New York, their wealth various across commodities. Beale additionally plays the silver-tongued Philip Lehman, Emmanuel’s son, who strikes the firm closer to the abstractions of the market, and Godley one intention or the opposite plays Philip’s son, the lush-loving Robert. Even because the three catapult along the script’s timeline, they never exchange their clothes. Costume sort designer Katrina Lindsay has dressed them in dark, long, bell-skirted coats that one way or the opposite radiate each and each Gilded Age sumptuousness and Bavarian humility. They additionally intensify the actors’ grace: The gap customarily rotates, and the three of them sway fancy dancers in a music field.

The gap sort designer, Es Devlin, places a broad cyclorama within the again of the glass situation of industrial, a curving video-show conceal conceal that presentations us dark-and-white photographs — a misty cotton field when the Lehmans are in Alabama, a altering New York skyline for the proceed north. Right thru the point out, pianist Candida Caldicot plays Reduce Powell’s point out-long composition, and the music makes the time seem swift, the music fancy water tumbling over rocks. The purpose out hasn’t upright promised loveliness, though. The discipline is Lehman, so we hope all of the cascading language will dangle some sophisticated inquisitive about the monetary machine, nonetheless the writers attain now not divulge. One does to find the sense that the point out laments the growth of complex monetary instruments and would resolve on that we went again to the time when folks in point of fact bought and bought tangible issues, nonetheless it indubitably’s nerve-racking to link such thoughts to the plantation South. (The repeated implication that the Lehmans invented being “middlemen” would additionally be hilarious to whichever man-in-a-tunic got right here up with it in primitive Sumer.)

Serene, as a portion of stagecraft, the point out is a symphony of theatermakers working at their pinnacle. The actors never cease being great, and the distance never stops being stunning, and the music never stops being beautiful. The music field spins on and on. Nevertheless the play is strongest when speaking about the usual three Lehmans — the principle fragment of the trilogy would be a standalone masterpiece — and the drama ideal grows much less connected to its characters because it marches down the generations. In a technique, the scurry of The Lehman Trilogy replicates the mourning skills: The purpose out begins with the involving, amazing inconvenience of Beale’s opening speech, and then we utter a substantial deal of time together, altering that sorrow into one thing we are able to are living with. It’s a route of that necessarily places the humanity of its figures farther from us because the hours wind forward. It’s now not Henry from now on, it’s upright a industry, we predict somewhere in hour two. So Lehman’s final give intention becomes a order, now not a bawl. Now we dangle already long past thru a route of of detachment; we dangle already let proceed.

The Lehman Trilogy is at the Nederlander Theatre.