JUST AS THE WORLD KEEPS TURNING, so does the huge glass box. In the newly reopening production (tonight) of The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway, all the action takes place inside that box, perched on a massive turntable.
When first revealed at curtain-up, the box represents glass-walled offices, home to the financial behemoth that was Lehman Brothers, on the momentous night in September 2008 when the company crashed to its death – the biggest bankruptcy in history, ushering in our so-called Great Recession.
Thereafter the revolving box, designed with stark elegance by Es Devlin, becomes an infinitely variable (and should I say always fully transparent?) showcase for the versatile talents of the play’s small cast. There are just three male stars, Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester. Each playing a multiplicity of parts, they trace the history of both the company and the family from 19th century immigrant beginnings to wealth and fortune, to final ignominious collapse 164 years later.
The play has changed somewhat since its Covid-enforced closure last year, just after it started a Broadway run to follow its successes in London and at the Park Avenue Armory. It was trimmed a bit for New York, though at 3 hours and 20 minutes it surely still earns the label ‘epic.’
There’s a cast-change, too. The BBC and West End stalwart, Ben Miles, left in order to play Thomas Cromwell in another trilogy’s final installment (Wolf Hall). In consequence Adrian Lester (right) is the one Lehman newbie, and instantly with one breath, a few words, and some minimal, economical action he masterfully dismisses whatever might remain of the outdated controversy over color-blind casting. A black Briton, he inhabits with utter and complete credibility the person of a 1840s Bavarian Jew. He had me at ‘Yis-gadal v’yis-kadash,’ the Kaddish’s very first phrase.
Lester is cast (his main role, that is) as number two of the three brothers who cross the Atlantic and start building up their firm, but like his fellow actors he also has to do duty in seemingly countless other roles, characters who appear more briefly down through the decades.
ARGUABLY, LESTER’S BEST ACTING CHOPS, at least in the comic realm, are on display when he suddenly becomes a thumb-in-mouth 3-year-old on his father’s knee, playing – in mimed action – with his dad’s straggly beard. His cast-mate, Beale, is not to be outdone. In one of his (relatively) minor turns he gives a caustic performance as a brother’s brazen mistress, later to become a complaining wife. Beale gets to play a kid, too, a hilariously precocious 9-year old boy in the second generation of American Lehmans, who will eventually become chairman of the board. The third principal, Godley, adds to his main job of portraying the youngest brother by scoring many little victories, not least with his delightfully arch simpering as the girlish fiancée to an older brother.
While the Lehman firm evolves, the message is pressed home without overly heavy emphasis that we’re witnessing the powerful growth and general takeover in American business of self-described ‘middle men.’ That phrase is proclaimed most often as if a victory banner is waving, and at other times with some irony and uncertainty. An accompanying epigram pronounces that ‘money’s role is to make money!’
Other repeated memes thread their way through the piece, created originally by Italian writer Stefano Massini, with this version adapted by Ben Power of Britain’s National Theatre. The repetitions carry resonant metaphors. Lehman family members often experience premonitions ahead of their various unwelcome twists of fate, which they can turn nevertheless to their advantage – until of course they can’t. The arrival of each such premonition is announced with the same picturesque imagery: ‘A cool breeze catches his ear’ and the breeze goes on to whisper its hints of oncoming destiny.
And a tightrope-walker appears – a fairly obvious metaphoric representative for people like the Lehmans who appear to miraculously walk on air. A good fifty years before the Financial District’s most famous funambulist, Philippe Petit (he of the astonishing World Trade Center stunt) there was Solomon Paprinskij, who repeatedly walks a wire between two light poles outside Lehmans’ offices. He never, ever falls – until of course he does. In the Trilogy, this fall prefigures the Great Crash of 1929.
THERE’S A SENSE AT TIMES that we’re watching an epic silent movie – an impression aided by musical accompaniment coming from a solo upright piano placed in the front row of the audience. One of the joys of live theater, unlike the silver screen, is that the actors here can, very wittily in places, enjoy some interplay with the pianist. (On the night I saw it, it was Gillian Berkowitz eloquently stroking the keys; on other nights it’s the Musical Director, Candida Caldicot.)
The Trilogy’s third act rushes by almost confusingly compared with the lucidity of the first two. Abbreviating this latter stretch of history must have brought difficult decisions for director Sam Mendes. Maybe there are just too many episodes being crammed into the tale’s dénouement, as the inventive back-projection (by Luke Halls) starts to spin faster and faster behind the glass box. Obviously it’s important to suggest a headlong rush toward disaster, and the team exploits one clever, fun idea when the chronology reaches The Sixties: foregrounding that decade’s dance-craze, ‘The Twist.’ The cast’s gyrations are a neat commentary on the Lehmans’ empire careening its way toward our more recent period of subprime mortgages and other such calamitous financial instruments. But for all the cleverness I couldn’t help feeling we were being hurried along clumsily.
All the same, as the action comes full circle in the final scene with the Kaddish again being solemnly recited, this iteration of The Lehman Trilogy is overall a triumph of scale and depth.
(The Lehman Trilogy’s official opening is tonight at the Nederlander Theatre, for a 14-week run, and it will later play in Los Angeles and San Francisco.)
