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Local News for a Global Village | www.VoiceSB.com
April 12, 2024
The Lehman Trilogy is Dazzling and Compelling Theater Review by Jesse Caverly / VOICE
CAUTIONARY TALE ABOUT LOSING YOUR WAY, 2022 TONY AWARD WINNING PLAY THE LEHMAN TRILOGY has begun a run at The Ensemble Theatre’s New Vic through to April 21st. It is both a measured and bravura performance that left viewers meditating on the price of power and the lengths we go to obtain it.
The biography of the Lehman family rings like many stories about the American Dream. Beginning with a dry goods store in Alabama in the 1840s, the Lehman brothers began with antebellum South cotton and end up with New York paper — enough paper to headquarter in a Manhattan skyscraper, 38 stories high. The move from paper, from tangible money with roots in real goods, into the abstract world of stocks and annuities, subprime loans and other repackaged financial products, led to their undoing. (The Lehman brothers are more antihero than dashing protagonists. Their start, profiting off of slavery, is not ignored. The underbelly of their endeavors, profiting off weapons in war and atomic energy post the WW2 bombing of Hiroshima, becomes the disconnect that occurs in these men, as their wealth and privilege propel them farther from their humble beginnings. The Lehman Trilogy is every bit a blockbuster, yet also an engaging slow burn. Helmed confidently by actors Troy Blendell, Chris Butler, and Leo Marks, directed with a sure hand by Oánh Nguyễn, ETC’s production presents a story of family and greed in a compelling and at times jaw-dropping show. Adapted from the epic poem by novelist and playwright Stefano Massini, the cadence of this performance is a mix of spoken word and omniscient storytelling. (Fitting, such a unique show-stopper of spoken word would land in April, National Poetry Month!) Much of the performance serves as formal narration, a POV third person colored with the inflection of the characters, their speech patterns, and viewpoints. Remarkably, the trilogy holds to this for a whopping three hours that flies by, with two intermissions. The actors deliver with artful confidence and brilliance.
Photos by Zach Mendez
For the Lehman brothers, their initial mandate to create safety and sanctuary for their family evolved into the financial juggernaut Lehman Brothers — and eventually as the face of greed and financial overreach that characterized the Great Recession of the late 2000s. If the timing of such a tale seems auspicious today, you are right. A pandemic, reconsiderations about the value of our time with loved ones versus the pursuit of a paycheck, all boil under the surface as the drama unfolds onstage.
Troy Blendell, Chris Butler, and Leo Marks
mercurial broker in between all things that takes their cut, but…what exactly for? As the family becomes more fixated on money than sanctuary and security, this role takes over and leads to their dissolution. By the time Lehman Brothers declares bankruptcy and is cannibalized by its peers and absorbed into the bigger appetite of late-stage capitalism, there isn’t a single Lehman brother on its board. This isn’t clear until the third act, but the show is cooking, and it ends with less of a bang and more of a glance back, as history and capitalism’s rapacious hunger grows. How will the trio be remembered? Hardly at all, except, in this wryly delicious bit of irony, a cautionary tale retold in a brilliant, contemporary theatrical production that dazzles in its restraint and compels with its daring. The Lehman Trilogy plays at the Old Vic from April 13th to the 21st, tickets ($40-86) at www.etcsb.org/production/the-lehman-trilogy/
The Lehman Trilogy opens where this epic tale ends: in an office, file storage boxes strewn about as if things are being packed up, the low hum of bad news in the background — sadly, we know why. This is the end of an almost two-centuries-old financial powerhouse, as the Great Recession of 2008 broke to the surface and made the Lehman Brothers one of its more auspicious examples. If an office, with desks and filing boxes and a small lamp sounds unimpressive, this sparse setting serves the stage well under Scenic Designer Fred Kinney. Boxes of papers and desks are moved about by the actors into new settings: street corners, stoops where card hustlers bamboozle passersby, window ledges where distraught wall street men jump to their deaths. When this set becomes an ark one Lehman brother must navigate through the terrible storm of the Great Depression, the transformation is striking. These simple building blocks gain even more depth by screen projections by Projection Designer Nicholas Santiago that bathe the stage and actors, highlighting the news or, in three cases, the nightmares that plague the Lehman brothers in their relentless pursuit of the American Dream. The Lehman Brothers were inventing what we now know as the middleman; that
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