Rags to riches to rags.
This ancient axiom neatly describes Stefano Massini’s epic play The Lehman Trilogy, now mesmerizing at Stages. Adapted from the Italian (and its five-hour long length) by Ben Power, Lehman now clocks in at a more reasonable three-and-a-half hours with two intermissions. Believe me, the time flies by.
Consistently entertaining, the drama encapsulates the history of the largest and most powerful of all American investment companies, Lehman Brothers, whose bankruptcy in 2008 rocked Wall Street and led to the collapse of the tottering global financial empire that had been built on sand. The fall was big, huge, and the consequences are still felt to this day.
Trilogy is the story of one side of American capitalism. Grit, greed, and hubris play a part in this kaleidoscope of global economics that begin in 1844 with the arrival of young Bavarian immigrant Hayum Lehmann (Spencer Plachy) who flees Germany’s rising antisemitism. Arriving “excited and trembling” at New York’s Castle Garden, he’s immediately given a new identity. Like so many other immigrants, this land of opportunity is his for the taking, if he’s up for it. Everything changes in America, he exclaims. With his new name Henry Lehman, the family tale spins wildly onward.
Settling in Montgomery, Alabama, he opens a dry goods store. With the later arrival of his two brothers, Emanuel (Orlando Arriaga) and Mayer (Robby Matlock), the store is christened Lehman Brothers. Henry is the head, Emanuel the arm, and young Mayer is the “potato,” smooth and just peeled.
For three years, saddled with debt, the three “work, work, work,” selling clothes and necessities to the poor sharecroppers, until Henry’s brainstorm that they should be dealing in Alabama’s golden cash crop, cotton. There’s profit to be made from this, as numbers fly across the stage floor and up the back wall. They can be the “middle men” between the plantation and the northern weaving factories. How many carts of raw goods will turn a profit? Cotton bolls are strewn across the stage. More numbers fly by, signifying their growing business acumen. The yellow fever pandemic takes Henry in 1855, but as the two surviving brothers sit “shiva,” their mantra of “we make money” takes root.
As Ash Parra’s lighting design pulses bright then dim, the brothers’ fortunes rise and fall with the catastrophe of the Civil War, the ruination of the cotton crop, a fortuitous move to New York, and then new prosperous business ventures into tobacco and coffee…and money management. Wall Street’s 1929 disaster ends Act II. In three acts, each an hour long, the Lehman brothers delineate the changing face of America’s economy.
Throughout, the three actors play multiple characters with a panoply of accents, tics, and subtle gestures. They grow old, they die, they totter off, while their fiancees, wives, wily sons, or politicians take their place. In Afsaneh Aayani’s marvelously efficient and atmospheric set design, lawyer’s file boxes are rearranged as desks, podiums, or seats as the fascinating family saga unfolds.
Power’s poetic adaptation, replete with repetition, overlays the drama with a mythic ancient vibe akin to Homer or Virgil. The brothers speak in the third person, whether talking about themselves or to others, that subtly distances us, and them, from the mundane. The drama goes universal.
Breathlessly directed by Stages’ artistic director Derek Charles Livingston, this story of an American dynasty’s pride and ultimate fall moves nimbly. While the third act veers into rushed territory, as if the author wanted to get to the ending as quickly as possible, we aren’t as moved as we should be by the inevitable decline of this family.
After nearly 164 years, the Lehman Brothers’ fortune dissolved into the largest bankruptcy in history, taking down numerous financial institutions with it. When the Lehmans moved from selling solid goods like cotton and plows into the province of ephemeral cash like prime mortgages, the end was almost certain. The fall was swift and ugly. American history is filled with such tales, and The Lehman Trilogy is thoroughly American in its own tragic way.
Stages has grown up with this thoroughly engrossing production of the 2022 Tony Award-winning Best Play. A crown jewel for its ’25-’26 season opener, it can’t be bettered. Glorious work by all.
The Lehman Trilogy continues through October 12. 6:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays; 7 p.m. Fridays; 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturdays; and 1 p.m. Sundays at The Gordy at Stages, 800 Rosine. For more information, call 713-527-0123 or visit stageshouston.com. $25 to $109.
