Written by the Italian Jewish playwright Stefano Massini and first staged in Milan in 2015, The Lehman Trilogy tells the story of the family that founded Lehman Brothers, from their arrival in American in the 1840s through their descendants’ Wall Street success to the firm’s collapse during the 2008 financial crisis. The play, translated into English and abridged from its original five hours, is now making a brief appearance on Broadway. Judith Miller writes in her review:
Despite the [high-quality] acting, a creative set, elegant staging, and inspired direction, The Lehman Trilogy often feels more like a lecture than a play. Another challenge is the focus on a Jewish immigrant family as the embodiment of the American dream. The play chronicles the reshaping, and the eventual abandonment, of the family’s Judaism and ritual observance over time. As each generation of Lehmans becomes colder, greedier, and more cynical, their attachment to traditional Jewish ritual and values fades. The family mourns the passing of Henry, [the first of the original brothers to arrive in the U.S.], by closing the firm and sitting shiva for a week; a few generations later, Lehman Brothers pauses for just a few seconds when closing the firm. . . . But [the] playwright Massini seems conflicted at times about whether the family’s loss of faith helped trigger its financial demise, or whether its integration in American life triggered that inevitable loss of faith.
[Moreover], the play also contains subtle but pervasive intimations of the classic anti-Semitic tropes it ostensibly laments, with invocations of Jewishness—and Jewish power, and Jewish money—used to cover gaps in the author’s dramatic imagination and historical reach. . . .
If there is a debate, or even discomfort within the family, about the morality of propping up slave owners, or profiting from civil war, there is little indication of it, while the actors utter more “barukh Hashems” than New York has skyscrapers. The audience is never permitted to forget that the enterprise and ambition that built modern capitalism—and three generations and 160 years later, the rapacious, self-destructive greed it [supposedly] inspired—are not just part of the American experience, but part of a particularly American Jewish impulse or imperative.
At the play’s end, the three original Lehmans reappear in their first Alabama store to say kaddish as the financial chaos sparked by their bankrupt firm in New York spreads throughout the world. Since the family is less than devout by then, the dramatic resort to kaddish feels like a particularly gratuitous reach for a significance at once overgeneralized and at the same time a bit creepy.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/283375/the-lehman-trilogy