Pat and Rick on The Lehman Trilogy

One of my favorite things I’ve written is a review of the show Mac Beth that was produced by ACT in 2018. The title of the play separated “Macbeth” into two words. So, in my review, I separated my own name into two, Pat and Rick, and wrote the review as a dialogue with myself. Here I go again on my own. This time, it’s about The Lehman Trilogy, no longer playing at ACT, but still on stage somewhere.

Pat: We’ve seen some good stuff recently. 

Rick: I’d say so, but the one I can’t get out of my mind is The Lehman Trilogy at ACT. 

Pat: Why’s that? Good or bad?

Rick: I still don’t know what to make of it. 

Pat: Well, the acting was great. The set and all the effects were mesmerizing. I mean, one of our favorite things –

Rick: Raindrops on kittens?

Pat: No, not that. The economical use of the physical space, turning a problem into an opportunity, a bug into a feature as they say.

Rick: And that was? 

Pat: The props. How the set was raised about two-and-a-half feet off the floor of the Falls Theater. First, that was good for visibility. It had the action take place up higher, so everything could be seen better. 

Rick: I noticed SIS did that for Unrivaled at the Bathhouse Theater. That worked really well for that show. It separated the different apartments and also, like you said, allowed us to see everyone better. 

Pat: Seattle Public did the same thing in that space for The Moors, back in April. Anyway, in The Lehman Trilogy, the three actors were constantly having to get different props, like suitcases or candles or whatever, when they were portraying a different Lehman brother or some other character. Instead of having to run off stage and back, or have the prop or costume piece brought on by a tech, everything was right there, piled on the floor around the raised platform.

Rick: That rotated!

Pat: Yes, I was there with you, remember? The platform rotated. And the actors could just reach down, or take a quick step down and grab a prop off of a pile and go on with the show. Easy peasy. At the same time with all the variety of items stacked all around, it gave a visual representation of what the play does. It reaches into the history of the Lehmans and brings various pieces into the light, into center stage, as they say. 

Rick: Right. That was great. But what was it about? 

Pat: I’ve got Wikipedia right here and it says, “The Lehman Trilogy is a three-act play by Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini. It follows the lives of three immigrant brothers from when they arrived in America and founded an investment firm through the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.”

Rick: And? 

Pat: It was an American epic. From rags – almost literally – to riches. The Lehmans arrive in Alabama from Europe, one at a time, and their business expands arithmetically as well, then geometrically when they move to New York, then exponentially, when they stop trading in fabric and cotton and coal and begin selling dreams. I got swept up. Carried away, maybe like they did – or the company did. I felt like I knew each of the brothers, and then, as they passed away, their sons and grandsons.

Rick: So it’s a tragedy? I think so too. But the play doesn’t really spell out what it was in the brothers and their descendants that caused the tragedy. What seed was in them? What did they lose? What did they forget? 

Pat: What do you think? I’m listening. 

Rick: One obvious thing you could point to is that they lose their religion. I love how they showed this. Early in the play, when the first brother dies, the other two sit shiva for the full seven days. They close the business and do nothing but observe the Jewish rituals to the full extent, with the tearing of garments and everything else. Later in the play, when the last brother dies, the remaining family members give it about 30 seconds and then move on. 

Pat: Yes, that was powerful. 

Rick: But the play didn’t really hang anything on that. It was never hinted that observance of religion made them good and ethical and that loss of religion made them also lose their way. It was more like changing with the times, like the way their clothes changed.

Pat: What if the business is a Frankenstein monster. Something that just got away from them. 

Rick: I think that’s closer to what the play seems to be about. There is that brilliant scene when a sort of consultant, not part of the family, who’s a kind of combination of Jim Cramer from his old CNBC show and Alec Baldwin’s character from Glengarry Glen Ross. He’s the one who convinces the company that they are not selling the cotton and the coal but are really selling people their own desires back to them, like “it’s not just your car it’s your freedom” or some pure nonsense like that. When they move away from what’s real and head into an almost mystical capitalist realm, then things go off the rails. 

Pat: They forget what honest business should be about. The monster then has to be destroyed.

Rick: I think that might be it. It’s a Frankenstein story. And a tragedy. But that reminds me of the ending. The part at the end where the three actors are standing downstage in a semicircle around a single candle, giving their solemn summations as the tiny light shines. 

Pat: Yes. That was fitting. Moving, even. Like a funeral.

Rick: But do you remember what happened the day we saw it? The one actor had reached down into one of the piles of props, lit the candle and placed it on the stage. But the light went out. Then one of the other actors went into the pile of props, took another match and re-lit the candle.

Pat: I thought it was a good save, as they say. It seemed odd that they would gather around a snuffed out candle to pay their final respects to the Lehman legacy. So after what seemed like a long time, the second actor lit it, even though it was not his responsibility. Or at least that’s how it seemed. Maybe that was planned that way. I don’t know. 

Rick: Given the tragedy, they should have left it dark. 

Afterword: Like Rick, I genuinely didn’t know what to think about The Lehman Trilogy when I began writing this piece. Now, I think I know. It turns out that this Frankenstein idea is not a new insight. I found a Variety review from 2018 that says the same. But it was a new discovery for us. Thank you for going on this journey with Pat, Rick and me. 

Photo from Yahoo Finance 

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