Leo Marks, Troy Blendell and Chris Butler (Photo by Zach Mendez)
Reviewed by Philip Brandes
Ensemble Theatre Company in Santa Barbara
Through April 21
RECOMMENDED
It begins with a vision: A new land. A new beginning. A new future with limitless possibilities.
In short, it’s the classic immigrant’s American Dream — draped in all its gauzy, idealized optimism—that’s drawn 23-year old Heyum Lehmann and his single suitcase of worldly possessions from Bavaria to a New York harbor dock in 1844. With his name erroneously recorded by a port official, newcomer Henry Lehman’s chance for a reinvented identity is complete.
So begins the dream-driven pursuit of wealth and power, spanning the 164-year rise and fall of one of the world’s great financial dynasties, as depicted in “The Lehman Trilogy.”
Ensemble Theatre Company’s riveting production at The New Vic theatre in Santa Barbara further confirms the 2022 Tony award-winning play’s epic stature among the likes of “The Kentucky Cycle” and “Angels in America.” The relative intimacy of the 300-seat venue is ideally suited to the show’s scale and scope, with an assured staging helmed and performed by well-established veterans of the SoCal stage scene (their various credits read like a laundry list of top local companies: Chance, Antaeus, Fountain, Echo, Rubicon, Matrix, Boston Court and Geffen Theaters, Shakespeare Center LA, Sacred Fools, Theatre of NOTE, Pasadena Playhouse, South Coast Rep).
Director Oánh Nguyễn cedes little ground in quality or professionalism to the previous National Tour production that played the Ahmanson in 2022. In the show’s three-actor format, impeccably executed by Troy Blendell, Chris Butler, and Leo Marks, over 50 characters are instantly differentiated with merely the subtlest shifts in tone, inflection, and posture as they hop around makeshift platforms improvised from modular office furniture (scenic design by Fred Kinney). A wall of stacked cardboard file storage boxes forms the backdrop screen for original location-setting projections by Nicholas Santiago. Amid the fine production values, watching the actors’ energetic, at times acrobatic, often hilarious and always moving performances is to experience live theater at its spellbinding best.
The play’s core characters are the three OG Lehmans, starting with Blendell’s thoughtful, hard-working Henry, the first of the brothers to arrive in America. Settling in Alabama, Henry toils away in a fabric and suit shop to save enough to pay for the passage of fiery, impulsive Emanuel (Butler) and practical, easy-going Mayer (Marks). In the play’s recurring central metaphor, they form an organic team: Henry, quick to recognizes opportunities, is the trio’s head, passionate Emanuel is the implementing arm, and beardless Mayer (chided for his “smooth as a potato” appearance), provides the insight and emotional glue to mediate conflicts between the other two.
The play traces the evolution of the Lehman business strategy as the brothers and their descendants seize upon opportunities: from retailing dry goods to serving as middlemen between cotton growers and mills, then connecting cotton and other products to Wall Street industries, branching out into railroads and transportation for product distribution, through the adoption of computers and other technologies. At the cusp of each turning point, recurring poetic imagery — a character’s prophetic dreams and a breeze of intuition caressing their ears — accompanies the next step in their cycle of endurance, determination, and triumph. Until, that is, it all comes crashing down with the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy that ushered in the 1989 Great Recession. As the narrative elegantly sums it up: “They were all invincible—until they weren’t.”
The journey implicitly embodies the evolution of monopoly capitalism, from the buying and selling of actual goods to the abstract use of money to make more money — culminating in the ultimate transactional formula that a newly hired Marketing Director (Butler) uses to describe the perfect customer: “They will give us money they don’t have for things they don’t need.”
A key theme is the play’s caution that the price for success in the American melting pot is the sacrifice of cultural identity—in this case, the Lehmans’ reformed Jewish heritage is elegantly reflected as their observance of sitting shiva following a family member’s death dwindles from the traditional week to three days to a mere three minutes of silence.
Although it references history (the Civil War, the 1929 Wall Street crash, and other transformative events), “The Lehman Trilogy” is not a historical drama in any conventional sense. External events are not explored in any factual context beyond their psychological impact on the characters and the choices they make — never the most ethically-driven, and even less so by the play’s end. A poignant comment about this fecklessness occurs in juxtaposed scenes of a Lehman descendant (Marks) at a horse race, flirting with his future wife (a superbly comic Blendell) while Butler recounts the stories of stock traders committing suicide on Black Thursday. Despite their flaws, characters themselves are vividly rendered throughout with the goal of understanding rather than judging them.
As with all great writing, the manner of the show’s telling is as essential as the story it tells. Playwright Stefano Massini’s original 2013 Italian version was composed as a 5-hour narrative poem with no specified allocation of lines to characters. In his English language adaptation for Britain’s National Theatre, Ben Power shaped the piece into its present three-actor format, performed in three roughly hour-long acts with two merciful intermissions.
Honoring Massini’s style and approach to the material, Powers’ adaptation is also delivered in blank verse, predominantly by each actor in direct address to the audience rather than through interactive dialogue. We’re watching an illustrated chronicle as told by third person narrators — exchanges between characters, when they occur, land with magnified import.
The show’s most fully realized characters are the company’s three founding brothers whose stories make up the first act. Each successive generation is rendered in an increasingly abstract, summary style covering longer stretches of time. In 1983, when Lehmans no longer run the company, their rival successors, numbers guy Pete Peterson and Trader Division head Lewis Glucksman, have only been glimpsed previously in childhood. The company’s final President, Dick Fuld, who presided over the bankruptcy that triggered the 2008 Great Recession, is only mentioned in passing.
The emotional distancing that results from this shift is a valid point of criticism. On the other hand, throughout the show, the actors remain in their initial characters’ costumes (credit Adriana Lambarri), and, when not actively performing other roles, their narrations retain the voices and perspectives of the three founders. It’s as if the entire story were being told by the ghosts of Henry, Emanuel and Mayer—and it makes a certain kind of sense that they would have less personal connection to the fallibilities and missteps in the more distant futures they observe. In the final passages, Henry’s ghost eloquently invokes the good old days:
When there was nothing
but three brothers
standing together in the morning sun
dreaming of America.
Lest the relevance of a story about immigrants and their offspring seem in any way marginalized by the current ginned-up hysteria around a supposed migrant crime wave, it’s worth remembering that purebred indigenous Americans amount to less than 3% of the U.S. population. The rest of us have an immigrant experience hanging somewhere on our family tree — whether initiated by choice or force, it makes us all subject to the seductions as well as the pitfalls of the American Dream. Attention should be paid.
Ensemble Theatre Company at The New Vic, 33 W. Victoria Street, Santa Barbara; Wed.-Thurs., 6:30 pm, Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 1 pm; added perfs., Sun., April 7, 7 pm, Tues., April 9, 6:30 pm, Sat., April 12, 1 pm; thru April 21. www.etcsb.org. Running time: three hours and thirty-five minutes with two intermissions.
