Theater
For all its heft, Stefano Massini’s play about the rise and fall of Lehman Bros.is a marvel of poetic restraint.
Aaron Krohn as Mayer Lehman, left, John Heffernan as Henry Lehman and Howard W. Overshown as Emanuel Lehman in the National Theatre and Neal Street Productions’ “The Lehman Trilogy,” presented at American Conservatory Theater.
Photo: Kevin Berne/American Conservatory Theater
A janitor in a deserted office empties garbage and shuffles around some banker’s boxes. Lights out, and it’s 164 years earlier, where a Jewish Bavarian immigrant on a New York dock stands with an overcoat on his back, suitcase in hand, sparkle in his eye.
In the opening two images of “The Lehman Trilogy,” no Lehman company exists. The first is all ruin; the second, all potential. In between, a humble shop metastasizes into one of the most powerful financial firms in the world. But maybe, this extraordinary 3½-hour epic suggests, even when Lehman Bros.was in its voracious, dizzying heyday, it was always just an illusion — a bubble we collectively inflated to bursting.
Aaron Krohn as Mayer Lehman, left, John Heffernan as Henry Lehman and Howard W. Overshown as Emanuel Lehman in the National Theatre and Neal Street Productions’ “The Lehman Trilogy,” presented at American Conservatory Theater.
Photo: Kevin Berne/American Conservatory Theater
Es Devlin’s entrancing set design for the National Theatre and Neal Street Productions’ work, which tours from England to American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater, makes the bubble and the dizziness literal by encasing the action in a rotating glass box. As three brothers (John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W. Overshown) found a men’s clothier in Alabama and expand it into a dry goods store, then a cotton brokerage, a bank and beyond, pivoting through decades with each seismic shock to American society, Luke Halls’ video design might spin in one direction, the set in the opposite. You’ll want to fasten your eyes to the theater’s proscenium arch for ballast — a canny distillation of the way we all looked away when Lehman and its peers made “restructured” financial products too complicated for laypeople to understand.
For all its heft, Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power, is its own marvel of poetic restraint. From the most streamlined phrases, he establishes how three founding brothers with chafing personalities maintain a precarious balance of power, how a marriage poisons itself or how fragile the world suddenly became on Oct. 24, 1929.
Howard W. Overshown as Emanuel Lehman in the National Theatre and Neal Street Productions’ “The Lehman Trilogy,” presented at American Conservatory Theater.
Photo: Kevin Berne/American Conservatory Theater
Massiniand Power also make the granular and individual mingle seamlessly, musically, with epochal transformations. A strictly observant family goes from rending its garments in religious mourning to dancing the Twist alone to the grave. The center of economic gravity shifts from a South propped up by slave labor to New York, with its babble of cosmopolitan accents all clamoring for a good deal. And another force is just as ruthless as the capitalism of the Lehmans’ adopted home: the way, with each generation, a brilliant businessman who made all the right bets suddenly finds himself out of touch with and cast out of the thing he created, ruing too late the irreversible plunder he has wrought.
The entire walloping play has the vision, craft and daring that most local productions, which can afford only a few weeks to rehearse, could never dream of. The three actors, directed by Sam Mendes, build whole universes around themselves out of nothing, then wipe it away and rebuild each time they play a new son or hanger-on. In an ocean of words, they’re lifeguards floating buoys toward us, teaching us to swim. Heffernan, as an Alabama governor, creates a voice so rotund you’d swear he’d sprouted jowls. Overshown, as a bunch of tough guys, seems to put the stage in motion through sheer force of mind. Krohn, as a parade of marriage candidates, then another of Hebrew school kids, so specifically embodies countless personalities as to reveal the human mien as an artistic canvas.
Howard W. Overshown as Emanuel Lehman (left), John Heffernan as Henry Lehman and Aaron Krohn as Mayer Lehman in the National Theatre and Neal Street Productions’ “The Lehman Trilogy,” presented at American Conservatory Theater.
Photo: Kevin Berne/American Conservatory Theater
Lifting and ferrying the cast’s impeccable delivery is pianistRebekah Bruce, seated just in front of the stage, playing compositions by Nick Powell that conjure the pinpricks of excitement of a promising transaction or the chugging oomph of locomotive power.
In one especially devastating late scene, an upstart marketing director (Overshown) proposes where Lehman must go next if it’s to retain power and keep growing. People can no longer merely buy things they need, he says, explaining his profession: “Marketing is to sell the concept that only those who buy will win the war. And since we’re all at war, all the time, then only those who buy, survive.”
If Lehman is no more, the war it helped start rages on, spurred by other illusions we have yet to spot.
Reach Lily Janiak: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com
More Information
“The Lehman Trilogy”: Adapted by Ben Power from Stefano Massini. Directed by Sam Mendes. Through June 23. Three hours, 30 minutes. $25-$147. Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., S.F. 415-749-2228. www.act-sf.org
Lily Janiak
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Lily Janiak
Lily Janiak joined the San Francisco Chronicle as theater critic in May 2016. Previously, her writing appeared in Theatre Bay Area, American Theatre, SF Weekly, the Village Voice and HowlRound. She holds a BA in theater studies from Yale and an MA in drama from San Francisco State.
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