A Bankrupt Enterprise 

One of the enduring images of the 2008 financial crisis and ensuing Great Recession was the sight of stunned and frightened former employees of Lehman Brothers toting cardboard boxes filled with family photos, office nicknacks and porcelain coffee mugs as they streamed out of Lehman’s New York headquarters on September 15 of that year, the date the fabled investment banking firm finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  Their lives — and the lives of countless millions of people affected by the Great Recession (which, to be clear, was not caused solely by Lehman Brothers and by some definitions actually began with the earlier housing crash) — would never be the same.

So when I entered the Broadway Playhouse Theatre and encountered an interesting-looking set (by Collette Pollard) representing a Lehman Brothers storage room stacked to the rafters with file boxes, I knew with 100% certainty that those boxes would be used, either literally or symbolically, to represent that dramatic day in American history when — just as it had seven years earlier, on September 11, 2001 — the ground trembled beneath everyone’s feet.

Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The Lehman Trilogy, a three-act play originally written in Italian by Stefano Massini and adapted by Ben Power, doesn’t even touch on the subprime mortgage crisis or the Great Recession, and only fleetingly references Lehman’s bankruptcy itself.  This was literally shocking to me because the lobby of the Broadway Playhouse Theatre, where the big opening night crowd waited for the doors to open, was filled with museum-style graphic exhibits explaining the subprime mortgage crisis and Lehman’s role in it in great detail.  It’s a well-designed exhibit and an accurate one, but it is utterly irrelevant to the play itself, other than as a guide to what a non-existent fourth act might have covered. 

Instead, The Lehman Trilogy is a fast-forwarded, extremely condensed biographical study of the actual Lehman brothers themselves — the people, not the firm — that begins when the Bavarian Heyum Lehmann (Mitchell J. Fain) arrives in New York in 1848 after a 45-day ocean journey and has his name changed by an immigration officer to the easier to spell and pronounce Henry Lehman.  This is almost certainly an old wives tale — immigrants’ names were already established on ship’s manifests, immigration officers had neither the motivation nor the authority to change names, and when names were eventually changed to make them simpler and more Americanized, it was done after landing by the immigrants themselves, largely to minimize bigotry.  

In any event, Henry Lehman is eventually joined in America by his brothers Emanuel Lehman (Anish Jethmelani) and Mayer Lehman (Joey Slotnick), though each of these actors plays multiple other roles — their descendants, their wives, their colleagues, and so forth — as we are taken on a hurried journey of 164 years, beginning with the Lehman brothers’ early days as very small-time fabric merchants and, soon after, cotton brokers, in pre-Civil War Alabama.  One of the few things I found satisfying about this play was how quickly the journey to 2008 — by which time, no descendants of the original Lehmans were still a part of the firm — transpired; there are virtually no longueurs in this crisply directed production. (It’s co-directed by Nick Bowling and Vanessa Stalling.) Time and place are represented by reasonably effective projections against the backdrop of those file boxes. 

But I was stunned at how superficial this play was.  It’s not merely that the subprime crisis and Lehman Brothers’ role in it is left completely unexamined.  It’s that virtually anything you could name — ranging from the slavery that undergirded the Lehmans’ cotton-dependent textile and brokering businesses, to the tribulations of late-stage capitalism, to the rough-and-tumble milieu of a big bank’s trading floor — is left under-examined.  I was the global head of marketing for 13 years for a Fortune 100 financial services firm, and I can testify that trading floors and back offices present some very interesting dramatic possibilities, but they are only briefly alluded to in The Lehman Brothers’ last act. 

There have been some accusations that Massini’s play is antisemitic, because the Lehmans and their descendants, as they transitioned from threadbare immigrants to successful merchants to bankers to traders, were focused on, gasp, making money.  But everyone in the world is focused on making money, and the Lehmans’ pursuit of success is never presented in a particularly unpleasant way.  They are shown as hard-working and creative.  Nor do the play’s non-Jewish characters make any antisemitic comments.  If anything, the Lehmans’ Judaism is mostly portrayed with gentle affection and occasional humor.

The play’s thinness and anxiety to cover too much ground too quickly is best exemplified by its treatment of the Great Depression, which is given spurious dramatic heft here by lurid accounts of ruined stockbrokers jumping out of Wall Street windows and shooting themselves in the head.  Just like the old wives tale of immigration officers changing the names of immigrants, this too is a pernicious myth, or at least an exaggeration (spread, oddly enough, by Winston Churchill of all people.) As any historian will testify, there was no statistically significant wave of stock trader suicides after the Crash.  This truth is acknowledge in a very thorough and informative “backstory” booklet given to all audience members.  

The manner in which Lehman Brothers survived the Depression is given only the briefest of treatments, as is the part the original brothers played in the building of the transcontinental railroad, and, in more recent years, the firm’s adoption of computer technology.  An exhortation by their director of marketing to the board of directors on the subject of sales is risibly unrealistic, as I can state from personal experience.  

The biggest of the many shortcomings in The Lehman Brothers Trilogy is the dramatic structure chosen by Massini.  There is no actual acting in this play.  Half of the story is narrated directly to the audience, in the manner of a run-of-the-mill PBS documentary; the other half is “acted out,” for lack of a better term, by the three actors who, in effect, represent for the audience what their interchanges with various other characters might have sounded like if we had actually been there to hear them.  There is no genuine emotion in these one-step-removed interactions, no dramatic tension, and no immediacy.  The lack of female actors in the cast means that the three actors have to impersonate women too, which is borderline embarrassing at times (we are subjected to a lot of fluty voices and a bit of cartoonish flouncing.) The actors themselves are fine, and this is not primarily a criticism of their performances or the manner in which they’ve been directed; it’s just that Massini has given them threadbare material to work with.  

Ultimately, The Lehman Brothers Trilogy (a pretentious title, by the way; this is merely a play in three acts) resembles, in its oddly gentle and uncritical tone, nothing so much as one of those privately published corporate hagiographies commissioned by a company’s PR department to illustrate the high points of the company’s history and handed out to employees at the firm’s 100th anniversary party.  Those books (which no one ever actually reads) don’t dwell on subjects like slavery or bankruptcy either.  And they aren’t meant to last.  Massini’s play has been a success d’estime since its first production in 2013.  But if ever there’s been a play that was purely a product of its time, this is it; as it is, it’s barely worth seeing now, and I can’t imagine it will be considered an attractive revival another decade from now.  

Somewhat Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented September 19 to November 26 by Broadway in Chicago and TimeLine Theatre Company at Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut.

Tickets are available at broadwayinchicago.com.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.