A stunningly staged ‘Lehman Trilogy’ critiques and romanticizes American capitalism

The chapter of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was a watershed second in what was ultimately dubbed the Nice Recession. The monetary companies big, as soon as presumed to be too massive to fail, turned an emblem — no, an object lesson — of Wall Avenue’s wanton recklessness.

Few following the apocalyptic headlines on the time would have been aware of the agency’s origins as a dry-goods retailer within the antebellum South. Henry Lehman, a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, arrived in the USA in 1844 and based a small retail enterprise in Montgomery, Ala. His brothers, Emanuel and Mayer, quickly adopted, and collectively they proved remarkably adept at responding to market wants and benefiting from different folks’s catastrophes.

How a store that offered fits and materials grew right into a mighty funding financial institution (the fourth largest within the nation on the time of its demise) is the topic of “The Lehman Trilogy,” a three-act epic tailored by Ben Energy from Italian playwright Stefano Massini’s hit European drama. This English-language model, which had its premiere at London’s Nationwide Theatre in 2018, arrives on the Ahmanson Theatre contemporary from its heralded Broadway run.

The main focus of the play, which opened Sunday in a Sam Mendes-directed manufacturing of lyrical splendor, isn’t the subprime mortgage disaster. The phrases “credit score default swap” are blessedly unstated. However “The Lehman Trilogy” traces the perversion of an financial logic that went from producing astonishing household wealth to almost capsizing the worldwide financial system.

The subject material could sound dry to those that robotically discard the enterprise part of a newspaper, however the play’s ambition is hovering. “The Lehman Trilogy” joins Lucy Prebble’s “Enron” and Ayad Akhtar’s “Junk” in kinetically dramatizing how American capitalism misplaced its method.

But it’s not a lot the excellence of the story because the superlative nature of the theatrical telling that units this manufacturing aside. “The Lehman Trilogy” is constructed as a dramatic elegy, an oral historical past delivered as if it had been written by a descendant of Homer. Mendes, an Oscar- and Tony-winning director (“American Magnificence, “The Ferryman”), responds to the play’s presentational type with one of many best stagings of his distinguished profession.

Phrases are intoned over a rating credited to sound designer Nick Powell and carried out by a pianist (Rebekah Bruce at Sunday’s efficiency) on the foot of the stage. The ingenious set by Es Devlin, a rotating glass dice revealing the Lehman Brothers New York workplace on the eve of the corporate’s collapse, serves as a metaphor for “the magical music field of America,” whose siren music lured immigrants to pursue a dream of boundless alternative.

The modernity of the scenic design isn’t any impediment for a play that’s almost out of time earlier than it emerges from the Nice Despair. The video design by Luke Halls creates a poetic cyclorama of sea and skyline that conjures historical past in black-and-white imagery and infrequently summons the nightmares of its characters in gory colour.

I’m unsure that I’ve ever seen a manufacturing as well-fitted to the Ahmanson stage as this one. What’s most notable in regards to the mise-en-scène is the right integration of the actors, whose performances are by no means eclipsed by the theatrical swirl. It’s via their artwork that this chronicle spanning greater than 160 years succeeds regardless of its repetitiveness, unbalanced plotting and final-act blurriness.

The chapter of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was a watershed second in what was ultimately dubbed the Nice Recession.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)

Two of the three solid members, Simon Russell Beale, a Shakespearean virtuoso with a five-octave vary of irony, and Adam Godley, a performer with clown-like plasticity, have been with “The Lehman Trilogy” since London. Howard W. Overshown, holding his personal with crisp authority, has joined the solid for this Los Angeles outing, changing Broadway solid member Adrian Lester, who stepped into the half vacated by Ben Miles, a key member of the unique ensemble.

“Mesmerizing” is a cliché of theater reviewing, however Beale, Godley and Overshown wield a robust incantatory spell. The almost 3½-hour operating time (which incorporates two intermissions) is a take a look at of endurance. However damaged up as it’s into roughly hourlong episodes, the manufacturing by no means feels plodding. Credit score the actors, who make even the play’s tough patches pulse with theatrical life.

Beale launches the dramatic journey as Henry Lehman, the eldest and brainiest of the three brothers, simply as he’s getting off the boat in New York. Overshown subsequently seems as Emanuel, nicknamed “the arm” for his scorching mood and basic toughness. Final however not least, Godley enters as Mayer, affectionately known as “the potato” however depended upon by his bickering siblings as their levelheaded mediator.

The primary act, essentially the most gripping of the three, recounts the rise of the household enterprise, which morphed from promoting garments and cloth to poor native employees to supplying all that was wanted to provide the world’s cotton. After a fireplace worn out the city’s plantations, the Lehmans assumed the place of lenders. By the point the Civil Conflict broke out, they had been well-established middlemen, shopping for uncooked cotton and transport it up north for a revenue. A New York workplace naturally turned the middle of an operation that after the Civil Conflict moved on to extra profitable commodities.

Henry is the primary to die, however Beale is just getting began. Along with his narrating duties, he takes on different elements when wanted, together with a plantation proprietor (with a good-ol’-boy Southern accent) and a headstrong divorcée who ensnares a Lehman scion. However his most vital function after Henry is Philip, son of Emanuel, who’s a prodigy of enterprise, possessed of a preternatural expertise for figuring out alternatives everybody else is just too distracted to note.

The opposite actors equally transition alongside the household tree, however fluidity is a part of the enjoying type from the start. In reality, the German accents don’t ever fully disappear from view, even because the Outdated World recedes into the space. “The Lehman Trilogy” is a theatrical palimpsest during which the previous is at all times visibly lurking underneath the ever-changing current.

Adam Godley, a performer with clown-like plasticity, has been with “The Lehman Trilogy” since London.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)

Assimilation brings disconnection together with untold riches. Capitalism acts as an accelerant, not a lot for the play however for the characters, who’re thrown into overdrive, determined to increase generational wealth and energy. Time is stolen from them, and the murmur of Jewish prayers subsides. After Henry dies, the brothers sit shiva for per week. When Mayer dies, solely three days is permitted. By the point Philip shuffles off his mortal coil, the corporate shuts down for a mere three minutes.

For all its vital perspective, “The Lehman Trilogy” takes a considerably romantic view of American capitalism. There’s an undercurrent of nostalgia for the “good outdated days” when shopping for and promoting concerned tangible items. A turning level happens when Philip declares to his father that they’re now “retailers of cash.” The enterprise has develop into summary, a numbers recreation that’s more and more open to manipulation and high-risk maneuvering.

Besotted with an earlier version of the American Dream, the one favored by nineteenth century European immigrants, Massini provides quick shrift to the best way the Lehman fortune was depending on the establishment of slavery. On this model of the script, Mayer, not wanting to depart Montgomery after the Civil Conflict, is advised that “the whole lot that was constructed right here was constructed on a criminal offense.” However the South remains to be largely seen because the launching pad for one household’s rise.

Historical past is offered as a sequence of bullet factors — wars, financial earthquakes, technological breakthroughs. However lived expertise is elided. Whether or not antisemitism darkened the Lehman brothers’ early days in Alabama is a query no extra dwelled upon than the residing situations of the enslaved employees who carried the plantation financial system.

A longing runs via the play for the older financial order, which is seen as extra gentlemanly and meritocratic than the brash new wave ushered in by predatory merchants, who’re extra snug with computer systems than with human beings.

By the point Robert Lehman, Philip’s Yale-educated son who makes Faustian bargains to maintain the corporate aggressive within the second half of the twentieth century, dies, there aren’t any extra Lehmans within the boardroom. However the seeds of destruction had been planted way back with the household’s palms.

Beale, Godley and Overshown are dressed all through in mourning fits, which is acceptable for a play that claims a kaddish for American capitalism. “The Lehman Trilogy” is without delay overlong and incomplete, however the theatrical image is so deftly drawn that it leaves a haunting picture of a nation grieving its personal delusion.

“The Lehman Trilogy” takes a considerably romantic view of American capitalism.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)

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