On Stage: The Lehman Trilogy

 There hasn't been much opportunity to see live theater for the past year and a half. So I did something I've not done before: go on a bus trip with a group--a one-day excursion--to see a Sunday afternoon matinee of The Lehman Trilogy on Broadway. 

This play premiered at the Park Avenue Armory back before the pandemic-the Armory is a highly influential place for plays to win an audience before a well-heeled group that looks for new talent. After a successful run in London, it returned to New York at the Broadway house, the Nederlander on 41st St., where Rent played for years. 

There are three actors who play all the many parts--Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Adrian Lester--beginning with the three Lehman brothers, who arrived in America sequentially in the 1850s. The first brother, whose Heyum was Anglicized to Henry, started a business in Alabama that grew to be a major cotton factor. 

 The story continues as the business grows and the brothers relocate to New York and we see how they are always able to adapt to changing economic and social conditions. The challenges began with the Civil War, which wiped out the Southern economy and gave the brothers a chance to show their ability to survive and even thrive.

Critics have pointed out that they never had any qualms about living off an economy built on slavery. We see how their focus was always on business. After each of the three original Lehmans dies, we see their descendants, the immediate heirs who build the firm even more aggressively, and then the next generation, which looks in different directions.

Robert Lehman (Bobby in the play) takes over and manages to lead the firm after the 1929 crash. His real interest was in art--he donated a whole wing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art--but he had the family talent for business, too. In contrast, his cousin Herbert was public spirited from his early days in school.

Herbert became New York's Governor after FDR and later was a U.S. Senator, and maintained his progressive stance, which included standing up to Joe McCarthy in the Senate. The play doesn't mention that his brother Irving became New York's Chief Judge.

All this would be mere fact recitation except for the brilliance of the performers. The most exciting actor seemed to me to be Simon Russell Beale, who places Henry and many others, including female characters. The other two actors are also excellent but Beale, whom I later learned--it's not mentioned in the Playbill-- is Sir Simon. He's already had a highly distinguished career on the British stage.

The set is simple, rotates, and provides a good background for all the history. All the production values--costumes, lighting--meet traditionally high Broadway standards. The play is not only well-acted, but it gives you a lot to contemplate. It tends to win your interest and often your acceptance of the main characters--especially the three brothers. But then you begin to think about what they had wrought.

The firm did not survive the 2008 blowup on Wall St. The play would suggest that this may have been because by then, the firm had been taken over by a larger entity so not only was it not operating with the traditional independence, but there likely weren't any Lehmans left in its management.

The story is compelling and the acting superb--yet the ultimate impact is less clear. It shows how a family can advance itself by absorbing the basic precepts of capitalism, and doesn't spend much time showing the downside. The brothers make no time, for example, to fret about slavery, or even the possibility that the Civil War may erupt and totally change the economic, much less the social, picture for them and everyone, especially in the South.

But they probably didn't worry much about  anything other than business. True, other factors affected the capitalist world, but th.ey were always seen as ancillary. The contrast between the two principal scions in the 20's, 30's and 40's--Robert and Herbert--does present the direction in which the family went: one stuck to the family trade even if he preferred to be an art connoisseur, and the other spurned the family firm altogether to pursue a successful political career that did produce benefits for the public at large.

 

 

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