Sam Mendes conjures Lehman brothers’ ghost
‘Trilogy’ brings indictment of the American dream to ACT stage
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Eat the rich.
It’s a political slogan first coined during the French Revolution. Wealth inequality is not a new thing, after all. But since the financial crisis of 2008, the phrase has also become something of a genre.
Films such as “The Big Short”(2015) and most recently “Dumb Money”(2023) are staples of “eat the rich” culture, which aims to anger as much as inform about Wall Street’s crimes. In these works, white men trade in terms like “credit default swaps” and teach us that “short” is not just an adjective but a verb.
Then there’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” which begins previews at American Conservatory Theater on Saturday, May 25. It fits unevenly in this genre, but like a lot of “eat the rich” art, it asks that fundamental question: How could an economic crisis of such scale happen?
The play offers a unique answer, however, both in its scope and style.
First conceived of by Italian playwright Florentine Stefano Massini in 2010, “The Lehman Trilogy” ferries audiences back to more than a century and a half to 1844. That’s when Henry Lehman — patriarch of what would become the financial giant Lehman Bros. — first arrived on the docks of Manhattan Island.
“Like so many others, he stepped into that magical music box called America,” writes Massini. These lyrical opening lines echo classic immigrant narratives. But what ensues is a multigenerational epic that follows the business of Henry (John Heffernan) and brothers Emmanuel (Howard W. Overshown) and Mayer (Aaron Krohn) forward through subsequent generations, domestic and world wars, boom and bust cycles, marriages and divorces.
In 2018, Massini’s more than 700-page prose poem was adapted to the English stage by British playwright Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes. Like the Lehman brothers themselves, their production also made its way to New York, where it garnered five Tony Awards in 2022. A national tour followed, though pandemic-related concerns postponed its Bay Area premiere.
Mendes is no stranger to artistic indictments of the American dream. The British director’s earliest films — from “American Beauty” to “Revolutionary Road” — all explore American masculinity in crisis. But here, Mendes and Power have a wider aim.
“The play’s objective is to cast light on the long, long build up to the 2008 collapse,” Power told the Chronicle via Zoom from the National Theater in London, where he’s working on another show, “London Tide.” “How we, as an economic entity, stepped away from trading in goods to trading in abstracts.”
The main economic target of Power’s adaptation is abstraction, which the play critiques through its own lithe sense of economy.
After numerous workshops, Power and Mendes felt that the core of Massini’s text lies in the relationship between the three brothers, and thus reduced the cast from 12 actors to three. The result is a fiery rhythm: Actors double, triple, quadruple and so
“The Lehman Trilogy” was adapted to the English stage by British playwright Ben Power.
on, almost endlessly, crossing geographies and identities, speaking in third and first person. The show thus demands a virtuosity and athleticism of its cast.
The music also does more with less.
“It’s influenced by a sort of minimalism,” explained composer and sound designer Nick Powell. “As the financial equations get more and more abstracted, I was hoping to reflect that in the music.”
A solo pianist interprets Powell’s score, inflecting the play’s themes. Candida Caldicot, who originated the role, said the music “goes on the journey with the characters, and sometimes comments on that journey, sometimes reminding them of where they’ve come from, and sometimes it brings the future.” In the delicate, sparse soundtrack released in 2021, the past often
sounds like a Yiddish lullaby, the future like glassy, open chords.
The set too affords a kind of double haunting. Visionary scenic designer Es Devlin conjured a massive, rotating glass cube, one that can instantly permutate from a biblical scene into a 21st-century boardroom. Actors scribble dates and equations on the walls with markers, the letters lingering into later scenes.
“I think Es literally read the line about America being a ‘magical music box,’ ” Power said. “She imagined the fluidity of that, the speed with which you could transform space.”
In reducing almost two centuries’ worth of history to three hours, a more than 700-page page text to a three-act play and financial system to a family, “The Lehman Trilogy” is not only a translation but a great feat of compression. But if such compression aims to target abstractions, it inevitably produces some of its own.
After its debut in 2018, for instance, the play received criticism for downplaying the Lehmans’ role in slavery not only as cotton brokers but also as owners of the enslaved. The team subsequently revised the script, and Emmanuel is now always played by a Black actor.
Another ghost that haunts the Lehmans is the abstraction of their Jewish identity. “As they are assimilated, generation after generation, the connection to their heritage becomes more distant,” Power said.
In engaging this question, the play risks resurrecting a Shylockian set of stereotypes: how depictions of Jews and money always risk presenting structural conditions as personal, and essentially Jewish, obsessions. Conservative and leftist Jewish critics agree the play traverses this dangerous territory.
The creators are not unaware of these critiques. Power often tells a fascinating story of Massini’s education in a Jewish school. “Because of Massini’s personal history and because of the presence of really thoughtful and informed Jewish artists on the team, I always felt like we were dealing with that responsibly within the play.”
These responses might satisfy some and disappoint others. But there’s no doubting the play’s enduring relevance. After all, most firms that survived 2008 are still around, and wealth inequality remains rampant.
“The Lehman Trilogy” might not be your typical “eat the rich” artwork, but it’s certain to leave one hungry for change.