Stage Review - The Lehman Trilogy (ACT)

Stage Review - The Lehman Trilogy
Presented By: ACT Contemporary Theatre - Seattle, WA
Show Run: April 27 - May 19, 2024
Date Reviewed: Thursday, May 02, 2024 (Opening Night)
Reviewed By: Greg Heilman

America has always been known as the land of opportunity, the American Dream ostensibly open to anyone who has the gumption and the work ethic to make it happen for themselves. Well, we’ve come to know that the idea of the American Dream is more of a generality, and that beyond the aforementioned gumption and work ethic, the ingredient that is not always talked about, but that is just as important is wealth, or money. At the very least, having money gives one an advantage for sure against those who are held back by a systemic form of poverty. The immigrant story in America is also one that is part and parcel of the dream, and there is no better story that encompasses all of these characteristics than that of the Lehman Brothers. Three Jewish brothers from Bavaria, who emigrated to America in the 1800s, started with little means but grew their story into a phenomenon, one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world, one which excelled until the corporation they founded was forced to close their doors by filing for bankruptcy in 2008. Their story has been chronicled in The Lehman Trilogy, written by Italian playwright Stefano Massini and first premiering in a French translated version in 2013. The show has been translated into 24 languages and debuted on Broadway in 2020 under the direction of the excellent Sam Mendes, winning five Tony awards, including Best Play and Best Direction. It’s also the show that ACT Contemporary Theatre has chosen to close out its 2023-24 season, not to mention the swan song of ACT’s Artistic Director John Langs, who also happens to be the director of The Lehman Trilogy. I can speak for most, if not all, of us when I say that John will leave a hole in the Seattle theatre scene and will be missed dearly, but he has taken on a lot here, the original play has a running time of five hours, and while the English translated version has been cut significantly, it’s still almost three and a half hours long, with two intermissions, and virtually all dialogue. While the story is engaging, and the play is very well written, three-plus hours could be a real slog if not done well. Thankfully, for ACT audiences, it is done well, not perfect, but more than well enough.

The word “trilogy” in the name of the play applies to a number of things here, from the three brothers, to the three generations of Lehmans that the story covers, and finally the structure of the play, told in three acts. The play starts out with brother Heyum arriving in New York from his home in Rimpar, Bavaria, before eventually settling in Montgomery, AL. It’s in Montgomery where he opens a fabric/textile store, serving the local plantations and slaves of Alabama and beyond. He also changes his name to Henry (“everything is different in America”) and is soon joined by brothers Emanuel and Mayer. The story follows the brothers from Bavaria to New York to Montgomery and back to New York, from their small startup fabric business through their investment and brokerage work in cotton, then coffee, from their own humble beginnings to the growth of one of the cornerstone financial organizations in the world, moved along by the brothers’ children and their children’s children. It’s a story of hope, love, family, and perseverance that delves into their Jewish and German heritage, their individual attitudes, and the fortitude that helped their family and business overcome a fire that destroyed most of the plantations supplying cotton to them, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and two world wars. It’s an engaging story that contrasts the building of a company by a group of elders with incentive to succeed, the incentive of survival, versus subsequent generations that don’t have the same motivations. It’s a common story, and one that many times ends in disaster, the children so focused on growing the company, they lose sight of the values with which the company was built to begin with. The Lehman Trilogy is generally a simple telling, three actors and a stripped back set, working in tandem to provide a significantly detailed telling of 164 years of family and financial history.

The three actors in the ACT production are Robert Pescovitz, Brandon J. Simmons, and Bradford Farwell. Robert plays the eldest, the “head”, Henry, while Brandon is Emanuel, the “arm”, and Bradford is Mayer, the youngest of the trio, nicknamed “potato”. But to say that each of these actors plays a particular character, as outlayed in the show’s Playbill, doesn’t do justice to these performances. I don’t think I’m risking exposing any spoilers when I mention that early on in the story Henry dies. My first thought during the opening night show was “What are they going to do for the rest of the show without him?”, especially because, for my money, Robert is the best and most appealing of the storytellers, which at the end of the day is what these actors are, storytellers. What is soon apparent is that not only do these actors play the characters mentioned above, they each play children or grandchildren of the elder brothers, Robert is Emanuel’s son Phillip, Bradford is Phillip’s son Bobby, and Brandon is Mayer’s son Herbert (45th Governor of NY), and they also play any number of other characters in the story, women, men, rabbis, stock traders, and so forth. These ancillary characters are all needed to tell these stories, and the actors do a wonderful job switching not just between characters, but between these characters and their roles as narrator/storytellers. In three and a half hours, there’s a lot of dialogue, a lot of accents (full marks to dialect coach Kate Myre), a lot of back and forth, and a lot of excellent acting. Each of the actors brings a unique manner in which they tell their piece of the story. Henry is commanding on stage, he has a knack for bringing the audience into the events he’s describing, and his character work is stellar. His Phillip is strong and determined, ruthless and driven, and his rabbi is wonderful and funny. Meanwhile Brandon’s characters have more of an edge to them, his Emanuel is very good, and his stock trader Lewis Glucksman is excellent. Characters aside, Brandon’s best moment is in his narration of the events of Black Thursday. His delivery is stern, emphatic, and shocking, it’s one of my favorite scenes in the show. Bradford’s delivery is a contrast to both of his castmates, his characters deliver physically as well as through their dialogue, a shaking hand here, a nervous tick there, and I like his narration especially during the early parts of the show when his Mayer acts as the arbiter between the “head” and the “arm”. Performance-wise on opening night, Bradford struggled at times finding the right start to his lines, mixing up names, and stepping on rather than reacting to prompts. I suppose that given the amount of dialogue, perhaps I should wonder why more wasn’t missed, and though Bradford was able to recover, the miscues were noticeable and enough to leave me wondering if it might be worth another run through or two to shake out the missteps. Outside of these particulars, the delivery of the dialogue and the story was excellent, and together the cadence among the three is very well paced and precise. The best example of this is during a scene in which the group provides Phillip’s backstory. It’s quick, it’s clear, and it’s done with a lot of motion, and emotion, on stage.

On the topic of motion, there is a lot of it in the telling of The Lehman Trilogy. Director John Langs does an excellent job moving his actors around the stage, or sometimes moving the stage around the actors, to make this an active story. Pace and motion is important to keep the audience’s attention in a show of this length, and John does very well here. The stage itself, part of Julia Hayes Welch’s scenic design, is laid out like a modern version of an old hardwood floor, with interlaced white planks. Toward the rear of the stage are a series of pillars rising up from the floor, that resemble the New York City skyline, or a bar graph, but are used as part of Mike Tutaj’s projection design, which is very creatively executed, precise in its use of these pillars, and of various set pieces that become ad hoc screens. As the drama of the story progresses, the pillars change, and the infrastructure of the scenic design continues to reflect the mood and action on stage. Meanwhile, the stage itself is bare to start, save for a player piano in the back corner that serves as a prop to bring a physicality to Robertson Witmer’s musical soundtrack. Each corner off the stage resembles a pile of stacked chairs tables and other pieces. What seems like a random pile of old furniture is really the source for all of the set pieces that come on stage, get moved around, and then placed back off stage again. There’s a choreography to all of this that makes The Lehman Trilogy the active show that it is, with a motion that helps keep the pace quick, but puts even more responsibility on the shoulders of the actors, adding to the impressive amount of dialogue that they need to handle. And perhaps it is all of this that made the opening night of The Lehman Trilogy fall short of perfect. Beyond the dialogue issues referred to above, there were a number of times when projections were missed, or inconsistent with the time frame of a particular scene. The good news is that these were corrected in real time, so while opening night may have felt more like a preview as a result, moving forward these are issues that have most likely been resolved. Of course, I’m reviewing opening night, not the future, so all I can work with in this case is what I know, and what I know is that this cast and crew are professionals and will strive to bring their best to every show. I tend to chalk these things up to the good and bad of live theatre, I move on and focus on the good, while feeling a responsibility to at least mention the things that I see fall a bit short.

What doesn’t fall short, though, are some of the supplemental design elements of the show, more specifically the light and sound design, from Andrew D. Smith and Meghan Roche, respectively. Andrew’s lighting is used as an excellent device in this production, from its focus on the actors in their narrations, to their use to provide an ominous glow to the Lehmans’ dream sequences. Where both excel especially is during the Civil War sequence and the Black Thursday scene. These two elements work extremely well together in this production, and complement the emotional tone of John Langs’ vision for The Lehman Trilogy.

At the end of the day, there’s no denying that The Lehman Trilogy is a long show, probably the longest on stage in the region this season, for sure on the professional side of the house. But what John Langs has done in casting this trio of actors, and compiling this creative team, is to take a long, detailed, and dialogue heavy play and create a piece that is paced quickly, flows well, and engages the audience from start to finish. The story of the Lehman brothers is one that underscores what can happen when people have the opportunity to follow the American dream, but what can also happen when the baton of that dream is handed to those who have lost touch with what drove the dream into existence to begin with. It’s a story of family and loyalty, one of hope and heartbreak, and ultimately one about the ups and downs of unchecked capitalism. You’re sure to come out of The Lehman Trilogy with an opinion about this family, our economic system and stature, and our country as a whole. Most likely it’ll be different than your neighbor’s opinion, and it could very well be a changed opinion from what you entered ACT’s Falls Theatre with before sitting down to enjoy The Lehman Trilogy, which you will most definitely do, it’s an excellent telling of an intriguing story.

The Lehman Trilogy runs on stage in the Falls Theatre at ACT Contemporary Theatre through May 19. For more information, including ticket availability and sales, visit https://acttheatre.org/.

Photo credit: Rosemary Dai Ross