The Lehman Trilogy (via NT Live)
I went to see the NT Live broadcast of The Lehman Trilogy yesterday evening.
The set - a rotating glass box which the cast occasionally wrote on with dry-erase marker, furnished with some sleekly anonymous black office furniture and a lot of cardboard filing boxes, a series of projections behind and surrounding the box - was as striking as it looked in production photos, and the three-man cast (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley) was fascinating to watch as they peopled the box with a multitude of characters, from the original three Lehman brothers in the nineteenth century all the way to the 2008 collapse. (There are only two moments when there are any other actors onstage: at the very beginning, when a janitor comes in to clean the office while listening to the collapse of Lehman Brothers on the radio in 2008; and at the very end, when a group of people in business attire come in as if to start removing the boxes, again in 2008.) Oddly enough, the last play I saw Simon Russell Beale in, the screening of Joe Hill-Gibbins' senior-thesis-y Richard II at the Almeida, back in February, was also a production where a small cast was stuck in a box and taking on multiple roles - SRB as Richard being one of the two actors who didn't, Leo Bill as Bolingbroke being the other - but The Lehman Trilogy felt much less random and muddy. Part of this is probably that the whole play is in third person, governed by the three brothers, but it also felt more intentional about why one of the three actors was taking on a particular role. (My favorite doubling is that SRB plays both Philip Lehman, the descendant in charge of Lehman Brothers at the time of the 1929 crash, and the tightrope walker who finally falls from his wire, Icarus-like, on the morning of the crash. SRB is the primary narrator during this bit, so we see him as Philip looking up to see the imagined tightrope walker, but because he's also been the tightrope walker, it's like he's both figures at once: a neatly efficient gesture to highlight the parallel between them. Another one I liked was also SRB: he is Henry Lehman, the eldest original Lehman brother, and the doctor who treats Henry in his final illness - which allows the play script to bring the doctor back onstage when the two remaining brothers are bickering over whether to relocate to New York, to declare that Henry loved New York - "almost as if these words were necessary for the plot," narrator-doctor-SRB says, cheekily - so that the brothers are together again, in spirit at least, as this decision is being made.)
The third-person narration, though, also kept the play at something of a remove, in my opinion; I was going to say that the actors were always toggling back and forth between character and chorus, but I think it's more that even as other characters, they never stop being chorus, narrating and commenting. The one exception, perhaps, is at the very beginning, when SRB as Henry Lehman, alone on the stage, first gets to America. SRB is able to inject such human wryness and wonder into this moment that it feels like the third-person narration falls away, and we're seeing Henry Lehman arrive, and then set up his store in Alabama; the lightly worn knowledgeableness as he describes the contents of the shop - and his mild amazement at this new fabric, "deneem" [denim] - "It doesn't tear!" - is a warm little delight. No one else - no other actor, but also no other character - gets to spend as much time by himself with us; once Ben Miles and Adam Godley come onstage, the other two brothers over from Bavaria to help with the store, everyone is always being interrupted by another voice.
(I feel like everything I've written thus far is in danger of turning into an SRB love-fest - and I do love him - so I want to at least give a shout-out to Adam Godley's hypnotic and deeply unsettling tarantella or danse macabre - "Bobby Lehman is seventy-five years old, and he is dancing the Twist" - which was probably the most viscerally upsetting moment of the play for me.)
(I'm also not sure where to put this, but I'd like to mention it: the play foregrounds - or maybe I just mean "doesn't apologize for" - the Jewishness of this story - the original playwright is Jewish - and I liked that. It allows ritual and repetition to be a part of the play in an important way, though I can't speak to the accuracy of those details: whenever the brothers re-enter their home, for example, they touch an imagined mezuzah, which becomes one of the things that lets us know that we're seeing the actors in their roles as brothers rather than as the less embodied chorus; and the idea of sitting shiva recurs meaningfully. And various key stories make an appearance: the plagues of Egypt - more on that anon - Noah's ark, the tower of Babel. [Various Lehmans throughout the play dream about building, or are metaphorically struggling to build, various edifices: the tower of Babel, a protective ark after the 1929 crash, a sukkah for Sukkot. The set's many filing boxes were stacked in various configurations to represent these structures.])
There was a little mention in the program about the play's connection to Homeric epic, and that was clear as I watched the play: even the title harks back to, if not epic, then at least Greek drama (like the Oedipus trilogy), and it felt in some ways like an epic in reverse - going from the founding of Rome to the fall of Troy, rather than vice versa. When Emanuel Lehman, the second of the three brothers, goes to New York City and describes it as a beehive, that's even the same famous epic simile Vergil uses to describe Aeneas' first sight of the city of Carthage. The brothers, even after their deaths in the play, remain as our guides, like a Greek chorus (the scenes of mourning that punctuate the play are also appropriate to epic and Greek tragedy); one could imagine that burst of radio at the play's beginning as a sort of invocation. Sing, o pecuniary Muse, of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers...
But if epic is a container for a country's or a people's founding myths - as is certainly the case with "pious Aeneas," progenitor of Rome, but is also true of Milton's attempt to explain the origins of all mankind in his quest to "justify the ways of God to man" - then it is both appropriate that The Lehman Trilogy is a story of immigration and the "miracle" of business, and increasingly (as I keep thinking about it) frustrating that the play dodges the question of slavery so thoroughly. The Lehman brothers, after all, get their start selling cotton - Alabama gold, as they call it, reverently, once in the play - but the enslaved people who labor to create that cotton are nowhere to be seen. The Civil War happens, as it must in a play like this: Ben Miles, standing in for all New York, yells "End slavery now!" at one point; the cotton fields burn again as they've burned earlier in the play; the brother-chorus notes that "the slave quarters are finally empty," where that word "finally" has to do a lot of lifting to keep that line from inadvertently sounding like a lament, coming as it does in the middle of a discussion about the ruined South and Meyer Lehman's attempts to figure out how to restart their family business. But that's nearly it - to say nothing (as the play also does) of the labor that builds the railroads the Lehmans eventually invest in. This is why the invocation of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt was such an odd story for the play to bring up, later on, as little Herbert Lehman challenges his rabbi ("I have a problem with that," he says - it's to be his catchphrase as he grows into manhood and politics - why did HaShem mess around with all those plagues, he asks, when he should have just killed the Pharaoh?). I was expecting some sort of parallel to be drawn there, and...just...nope. It's used as a moment to show us about Herbert's inquisitiveness and willingness to challenge authority, and nothing more. It's a real limitation, I think, and a missed opportunity - because epic has room for other voices to serve as powerful counterpoint: Dido, who is abandoned to the implacable demand of Rome's founding; the servant girls murdered by Odysseus and Telemachus, whose feet dangle so piteously in the air as they are hanged. I certainly would not have wanted these white British actors to try to take on the roles of slaves - it felt like the play only left room for them to play even women in a way that would provoke laughter - but there could easily have been a way for the chorus to give voice to some further awareness and evocation of the other backs that Lehman Brothers was built on.
The set - a rotating glass box which the cast occasionally wrote on with dry-erase marker, furnished with some sleekly anonymous black office furniture and a lot of cardboard filing boxes, a series of projections behind and surrounding the box - was as striking as it looked in production photos, and the three-man cast (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley) was fascinating to watch as they peopled the box with a multitude of characters, from the original three Lehman brothers in the nineteenth century all the way to the 2008 collapse. (There are only two moments when there are any other actors onstage: at the very beginning, when a janitor comes in to clean the office while listening to the collapse of Lehman Brothers on the radio in 2008; and at the very end, when a group of people in business attire come in as if to start removing the boxes, again in 2008.) Oddly enough, the last play I saw Simon Russell Beale in, the screening of Joe Hill-Gibbins' senior-thesis-y Richard II at the Almeida, back in February, was also a production where a small cast was stuck in a box and taking on multiple roles - SRB as Richard being one of the two actors who didn't, Leo Bill as Bolingbroke being the other - but The Lehman Trilogy felt much less random and muddy. Part of this is probably that the whole play is in third person, governed by the three brothers, but it also felt more intentional about why one of the three actors was taking on a particular role. (My favorite doubling is that SRB plays both Philip Lehman, the descendant in charge of Lehman Brothers at the time of the 1929 crash, and the tightrope walker who finally falls from his wire, Icarus-like, on the morning of the crash. SRB is the primary narrator during this bit, so we see him as Philip looking up to see the imagined tightrope walker, but because he's also been the tightrope walker, it's like he's both figures at once: a neatly efficient gesture to highlight the parallel between them. Another one I liked was also SRB: he is Henry Lehman, the eldest original Lehman brother, and the doctor who treats Henry in his final illness - which allows the play script to bring the doctor back onstage when the two remaining brothers are bickering over whether to relocate to New York, to declare that Henry loved New York - "almost as if these words were necessary for the plot," narrator-doctor-SRB says, cheekily - so that the brothers are together again, in spirit at least, as this decision is being made.)
The third-person narration, though, also kept the play at something of a remove, in my opinion; I was going to say that the actors were always toggling back and forth between character and chorus, but I think it's more that even as other characters, they never stop being chorus, narrating and commenting. The one exception, perhaps, is at the very beginning, when SRB as Henry Lehman, alone on the stage, first gets to America. SRB is able to inject such human wryness and wonder into this moment that it feels like the third-person narration falls away, and we're seeing Henry Lehman arrive, and then set up his store in Alabama; the lightly worn knowledgeableness as he describes the contents of the shop - and his mild amazement at this new fabric, "deneem" [denim] - "It doesn't tear!" - is a warm little delight. No one else - no other actor, but also no other character - gets to spend as much time by himself with us; once Ben Miles and Adam Godley come onstage, the other two brothers over from Bavaria to help with the store, everyone is always being interrupted by another voice.
(I feel like everything I've written thus far is in danger of turning into an SRB love-fest - and I do love him - so I want to at least give a shout-out to Adam Godley's hypnotic and deeply unsettling tarantella or danse macabre - "Bobby Lehman is seventy-five years old, and he is dancing the Twist" - which was probably the most viscerally upsetting moment of the play for me.)
(I'm also not sure where to put this, but I'd like to mention it: the play foregrounds - or maybe I just mean "doesn't apologize for" - the Jewishness of this story - the original playwright is Jewish - and I liked that. It allows ritual and repetition to be a part of the play in an important way, though I can't speak to the accuracy of those details: whenever the brothers re-enter their home, for example, they touch an imagined mezuzah, which becomes one of the things that lets us know that we're seeing the actors in their roles as brothers rather than as the less embodied chorus; and the idea of sitting shiva recurs meaningfully. And various key stories make an appearance: the plagues of Egypt - more on that anon - Noah's ark, the tower of Babel. [Various Lehmans throughout the play dream about building, or are metaphorically struggling to build, various edifices: the tower of Babel, a protective ark after the 1929 crash, a sukkah for Sukkot. The set's many filing boxes were stacked in various configurations to represent these structures.])
There was a little mention in the program about the play's connection to Homeric epic, and that was clear as I watched the play: even the title harks back to, if not epic, then at least Greek drama (like the Oedipus trilogy), and it felt in some ways like an epic in reverse - going from the founding of Rome to the fall of Troy, rather than vice versa. When Emanuel Lehman, the second of the three brothers, goes to New York City and describes it as a beehive, that's even the same famous epic simile Vergil uses to describe Aeneas' first sight of the city of Carthage. The brothers, even after their deaths in the play, remain as our guides, like a Greek chorus (the scenes of mourning that punctuate the play are also appropriate to epic and Greek tragedy); one could imagine that burst of radio at the play's beginning as a sort of invocation. Sing, o pecuniary Muse, of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers...
But if epic is a container for a country's or a people's founding myths - as is certainly the case with "pious Aeneas," progenitor of Rome, but is also true of Milton's attempt to explain the origins of all mankind in his quest to "justify the ways of God to man" - then it is both appropriate that The Lehman Trilogy is a story of immigration and the "miracle" of business, and increasingly (as I keep thinking about it) frustrating that the play dodges the question of slavery so thoroughly. The Lehman brothers, after all, get their start selling cotton - Alabama gold, as they call it, reverently, once in the play - but the enslaved people who labor to create that cotton are nowhere to be seen. The Civil War happens, as it must in a play like this: Ben Miles, standing in for all New York, yells "End slavery now!" at one point; the cotton fields burn again as they've burned earlier in the play; the brother-chorus notes that "the slave quarters are finally empty," where that word "finally" has to do a lot of lifting to keep that line from inadvertently sounding like a lament, coming as it does in the middle of a discussion about the ruined South and Meyer Lehman's attempts to figure out how to restart their family business. But that's nearly it - to say nothing (as the play also does) of the labor that builds the railroads the Lehmans eventually invest in. This is why the invocation of the Israelites in slavery in Egypt was such an odd story for the play to bring up, later on, as little Herbert Lehman challenges his rabbi ("I have a problem with that," he says - it's to be his catchphrase as he grows into manhood and politics - why did HaShem mess around with all those plagues, he asks, when he should have just killed the Pharaoh?). I was expecting some sort of parallel to be drawn there, and...just...nope. It's used as a moment to show us about Herbert's inquisitiveness and willingness to challenge authority, and nothing more. It's a real limitation, I think, and a missed opportunity - because epic has room for other voices to serve as powerful counterpoint: Dido, who is abandoned to the implacable demand of Rome's founding; the servant girls murdered by Odysseus and Telemachus, whose feet dangle so piteously in the air as they are hanged. I certainly would not have wanted these white British actors to try to take on the roles of slaves - it felt like the play only left room for them to play even women in a way that would provoke laughter - but there could easily have been a way for the chorus to give voice to some further awareness and evocation of the other backs that Lehman Brothers was built on.