Off-Broadway Review: ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the Park Avenue Armory is theater at its best

Where to begin to describe this astonishing show? The Lehman Trilogy is immense, profound and beautiful. Three hours of thick plot, enlivened by three actors of shocking, thrilling abilities, who take us through 150 years of the history of consumerism as the three Lehman brothers invent capitalism and with it Western civilization. Three immigrants “come from nothing and create a universe.” It doesn’t matter if you know nothing about the stock market and care less: This is theater at its best.

Written by Stefano Massini, adapted into English by Ben Power, and directed by Sam Mendes, this North American premiere is a major theatrical event not to be missed. It returns to London after April 20, so hurry.

The production is housed in the huge Wade Thompson Drill Hall (55,000 square feet), and the contrast between the grandeur of the 19th-century building and the ultra-contemporary stage (designed by Es Devlin) is part of the excitement. A glass box serves in varioius ways as a Wall Street board room and a tiny store in Montgomery, Ala. Behind it is a gigantic curved screen where ingenious black and white projections (designed by Luke Halls) create a far-reaching world, from cotton plantations to New York harbor. It seems to move toward us, sometimes with visceral threat, sometimes with distant calm.

The Lehman Trilogy begins at the end. Unknown people in shirtsleeves come and pack up The Lehman Brothers office. It’s 2008, and the business is bankrupt, like much of the United States. And then we are swept back to 1844, when Henry Lehman (Simon Russell Beale), a German Jew, steps off the boat in his best shoes. He will be joined in a few years by his younger brother, Emanuel (Ben Miles), and a few years after that by the youngest Lehman, Mayer (Adam Godley). Together they invent the middleman; they buy cotton from the Southern plantation owners and see it to the Northern factory owners. This will lead to their move to New York, “completely shameless, completely sublime,” and, through the years, to their investments in the future they invent: railways, blockbuster movies, computers.

As time passes, they all marry and have many children. All these characters are played by the same three actors, still wearing their wonderful black frock coats (costumes by Katrina Lindsay) and sliding from one perfect accent to another. The children grow up and take over the business. We come to know all these characters intimately and feel various sympathies for them; the play outlines their ruthless greed, but because it is told from their point of view, it doesn’t traffic in moral judgements, nor does it invite ours. We are simply there, in it, with them, marvelling at their ingenuity, their eccentricities, their brilliance.

As each of the original Lehman brothers dies, the others sit shiva; as time goes by, each death is observed with less and less tradition, until, at last, the ghostly old men reunite in a deeply moving stage picture to recite the Kaddash, the prayer for the dead, over the corpse of the American Dream.

Through April 20 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York.