REVIEW: The Lehman Trilogy (Shakespeare Theatre Company)
Behold, the humble potato.
The dense, nutritious tuber, first domesticated in the peaks of the Peruvian Andes some millennia ago, is a global favorite. Fry them, bake them, roast them, mash them, there’s hardly a form which doesn’t satisfy. As the culinary bedrock of millions, it has caused both empirical bliss and unforgiving torment from harvest-to-harvest. For something as simple as a dirty, brown lump, its impact cannot be overstated. And yet, like most Americans, I don’t find myself that consciously impacted by them to an equal amount, at least compared to how much I consume them. The commercialization of agriculture and subsequent indulgence of food stock has reduced the societal value of most ingredients, but particularly the potato. I wouldn’t consider them that paramount to my day-to-day life beyond occasional sustenance.
But in 2024, something I do consider paramount would be the brand of capitalism we live under, the one that ensnarls each new generation of prospective homeowners as the years tick by. In 2008, as the Great Recession drowned housing supply and personal capital, I played Wii Sports. I had little awareness as an 11-year-old boy what the economy even was, much less about the Powers That Were which crumbled around us, rendering whole generations destitute and sentenced to a life of uncreditworthiness. Much less about the cataclysmic downfall of the Lehman Brothers Corporation, and much, much less about the titular immigrant brothers from Bavaria who kick-started this whole thing nearly 150 years prior. Much, much, much less that Mayer — “Spud” Lehman as he was known, due to his humble, potato-like stature — was one of the most ingenious vegetables in the history of the global economy.
This kind of potato is now paramount. A man of the sort likened to the friendly convenience and hospitality of one, alongside his brothers Henry and Emanuel, set in motion the modern epic that is Shakespeare Theatre Company’s DC premiere of The Lehman Trilogy. Spanning nearly four hours over three acts and two intermissions, it’s not a light work, but it’s a great one, and director Arin Arbus has made this must-see viewing.
Book
You can take the play out of the radio, but you can’t take the radio out of the play. Lehman is, at its core, a radio play adapted to a new dimension. Originally written by Italian playwright Stefano Massini, it was adapted into English by Ben Power ahead of a London premiere at the National Theatre in 2018. This results in the feeling that you’re basically being read a book by the actors as they continually describe each other’s colors, textures, and mannerisms in great detail. At several opportunities — if not the entire thing — you could close your eyes and just listen, as intended, and everything would make sense. But, why would you? The wordsmithing is so rich with detail, so excited to tell you about the world, that said excitement infects you to watch it unfold alongside the company and your audience mates. It relies heavily on repetition as a motif, echoing the generational nature of the piece. As mistakes and personal catastrophe ring back ‘round year-after-year-after-year, you become familiar with several phrases that begin to feel like familial catch-phrases; quips or mannerisms that only you and your relatives ever said. “I have a problem with that!”, and a jumble of words followed by “I take my leave, sir”, are just some that come back to mind. Like Angels in America before it, it relies on ear-perkingly good conversation to make those hours in your seat just fly by. The detailed prose is just one layer of this baklava of storytelling, in that Massini put himself to the task of tasking three actors to tell nine-plus stories over the course of a century—a stunning task to brunt, thankfully leading to an equally-stunning result. From all I heard about the play, I had sort of assumed that it would be more of a “hard” trilogy. You know, like each act represents a generation of Lehmans with hard date cutoffs and only passing mentions of the others, so that the myriad of characters wouldn’t confuse the audience. Perhaps I did not give the audience enough credit? The iridescent plot canvasses across years and decades at natural breaks, with major historic milestones setting the act-end turning points. The character array fluctuates betwitxt decades, years, genders, and acts, comprising a surprisingly colorful group of personalities to interact with with just the three actors. While I’ve been singing the song of Lehman quite loudly to this point, I do admit some gripes. For something as long and serious as this play is, it increasingly loses focus on explaining the dense economic concepts that drive the decisions; though, their density does become a more difficult hill to climb from a storytelling perspective. By the end of Act III you’re left to simply “get” that their policies and entangled operations are bad news, even if you’re not that familiar with the world of finance. This would be more forgivable in the event that the collapse of the economy in 2008 hit the audience with more “oomph”, but instead it feels anti-climactic. It feels…melancholic. A respectable choice, definitely, and one that still works to partially drive home the emotional magnitude of the capitalistic fable, but less so the historical. I won’t let that deter me, though; this remains an excellent piece of drama that’s funny, complex, and provocative, and is certainly in conversation to be one of the best plays of the 2010s. 10/10
Acting
There’s three of them.
Four hours, three acts, and three actors. Countless characters between, such as wives, children, customers, governors, and slaves. The real makings of a dialectical knot, for sure, and in a flooring feat of performance, it does not come to fruition. The spellbinding trio of Edward Gero, Mark Nelson, and René Thornton, Jr. are subtle, frank, jubilant — pick an adjective, any adjective — all at once. Whether they’re wallowing in Jewish piety, begging potential suitors for their hands in marriage, or being 140 years old and still doing the Twist, the range is awe-inspiring. This is a demanding piece, and Shakespeare may have casted no better three than what we have at the Harman. Each bring so much charisma, so much chutzpah that I can’t even pick a standout. It makes me want to intentionally go see an understudy just to go see their take on something so…magnanimous. 10/10
Production
I know that this is the production section, but it’s a testament to the acting how much they carry the weight of words in Marsha Ginsberg’s sterile set. Sitting in the corner of the cavernous gray box of a set lay dunes of shredded paper. The ashes of an era forgone, torn receipts from the corpses of finance, however you wish to interpret it, they’re there, haunting every line. Opposing this is a handful of desks and chairs (subtly updating to match the times, a nice detail) and a large trapdoor which reveals a “primary” piece, such as a cabinet for the shop or a pile of computers for the modern era. Where this production really hits the mark is its titanic, dreamlike projections. The way Hannah Wasileski lets them morph into each other at the seams of the walls is impressive, creating a parallax effect that I’ve not really seen in live theatre before. Much of the energy comes from those when not the dialogue, and coupled with stark, haunting labels establishing the years as they go by, creates a foreboding mood that expertly sets the tone. 9/10
Viz
What’s going on here, exactly? The marketing is embracing its New York-y, suited up aesthetic, but beyond the program and some ads about the show’s Tony success, it doesn’t bring a lot of intrigue. “Why would someone want to watch a show about the stock market? “ The pre-show staging doesn’t do any favors; it’s just a black curtain, obscuring everything. Not even any sounds. There’s nothing to discern about what could happen. One positive I can content with however, is that it makes the opening of each act all the more impactful, since you don’t know what’s about to happen. Especially so in Act I, when the curtain reveals a bright purgatory of finance, treading the line between narrative exposition and in-media-res. 3/10
Verdict
Shakespeare’s The Lehman Trilogy is an excellent rendition of historical melodrama, told eloquently and excitedly through its immaculate trio of actors and creative projections.
32/40
