“The Lehman Trilogy” takes the stage at Theatrical Outfit on Feb. 8, running through March 2.
“The Lehman Trilogy” is a play comprised of three 50-minute acts that tells the story of the Lehman brothers from when they first immigrated to the United States through the collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008.
“You might hear ‘three-hour play,’ and think – oh, that sounds very long. But actually, it’s just like sitting down to watch an incredible three-part HBO miniseries,” said Matt Torney, the director of the production. “Each act has a completely different flavor, a different type of storytelling, a different style.”
Torney, who is also the artistic director of Theatrical Outfit, praised the play as not just a history lesson about the Lehman Brothers or American capitalism, but a thorough examination of both of those things through a singularly human lens.
“I think when people walk out at the end of the play, they’re going to definitely have learned some things about the Lehman Brothers business and definitely have new reflections on America’s relationship with capitalism during its history,” Torney said. “But there’s just something very, very moving about epic stories of human struggle. Because we know the end, that it ends with the bank failing, the play kind of echoes Shakespeare in some way. Just with this American skin.”
Rough Draft spoke with Torney about the show ahead of its opening. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about how you came on board for this project, and what drew you to “The Lehman Trilogy” as a play?
Matt Torney: The play has got quite an interesting origin story, in that it was originally a best-selling Italian novel that was written by this dude called Stefano Massini, who’s one of Italy’s most prolific and famous writers. It was prompted by the total collapse of the Lehman Brothers bank in 2008, which was the first of the big banks to fall, followed quickly by Bear Stearns, and the whole American financial system was thrown into turmoil. He was very interested in, you know, why is it called the Lehman Brothers? Who were they? What happened? He basically traced the story of the Lehman Brothers company all the way back to the beginning, when three brothers from Rimpar, Bavaria – three Jewish brothers – stepped off the boat in the 1840s and set up a business in Montgomery, Alabama, selling fabric and suits. He followed the story through time as the Lehmans expanded and expanded and expanded from this immigrant story into, at one point, the biggest investment bank in the world, and then the collapse.
In the novel, he’s looking at ideas of generational change, immigrant stories, the American dream. What does it mean? Human fascination with money. By no means is it saying the Lehman Brothers are great. It’s just an exploration of this truly extraordinary story. It was adapted into a play that was seven hours long and had 30 people in it in Rome, and someone at the National Theatre in England was like, there’s something in this story, but maybe not the seven hour version. They hired the director Sam Mendes to work with a British playwright called Ben Power to adapt it for the National Theatre.
What they decided to do was tell the entire story with three actors who represented the three original brothers, and that those three actors would perform as brothers, and then they perform one another’s children, and the wives, and all the folks that worked with them. In three hours, you get the entire history of this business that became one of the biggest banks in the world and then collapsed. Because money is connected to history, you also get a history of America through the eyes of these immigrants. How the financial system was developed from their perspectives, the Civil War, the first World War, Black Thursday in 1929. It becomes this fascinating exploration of how America became America, sort of like an origin story of the country through the eyes of these Jewish immigrants.
In talking about the idea of how America became America, I think when you hear that sentence, it’s easy to see how something like this would be seven hours long. That’s a big idea to tackle inside of a relatively small production. For you as a director, how do you work with the actors and a relatively small team to cover something that expansive?
Torney: I think the most important thing to say is that the script is absolutely brilliant. It’s very poetic and mixes real scenes with poetic monologs, and montages, and dreams. It’s less of a heavy duty history play and more of really understanding all of this stuff from a human perspective, by which I mean an emotional and spiritual perspective. This is not an essay about how things got the way they were, or a thesis on it. It’s something else. It’s something deeply theatrical. It’s like a human exploration of the human urge to accumulate more, to build, to want to increase. I think that’s used both as a positive and a negative. That’s the drive that got people to the moon, but it’s also what causes rapacious billionaires to consume us.
That idea is not one thing, it is many things, and allows the power of metaphor in the theater, in which a chair or a table can become anything you wanted to, just by an act of imagination. It means you can instantly leap through time, instantly leap through space. Someone changes a hat, and they’re a different person. It’s a remarkably efficient medium to create really evocative images. In the Broadway production, they had like 17 video projectors and they immersed the audience into what was essentially a live film. We’re not doing that, partly because it’s already been done. People have already seen that. You can find it on the internet and watch it if you want. But also because there’s something that happens whenever you partner with an audience to be like, this chair is a carriage, this chair is a tower – the act of imagination means the audience are going with you. You’re helping build a much bigger canvas of images. Our job has just been to unlock the creativity of storytelling.
We’ve got three incredible actors, and they’re all masters of dialect. You’ve got all these different accents, and characters who are immigrants, characters who are from elsewhere. They’ve perfected the difference between an early 20th century American New York dialect and what you hear in the 80s. The efficiency with which they change identities is dazzling, and ultimately, I think that’s what makes the play so compelling. It’s like you’re in the middle of a kaleidoscope, and you’ve got this strong narrative just driving through towards an end that you already know, and yet you can’t help but recognize the humanity of the people along the way.
We’ve got an incredible score from Kendall Simpson, lighting design from David Reingold. All the designers were partners in telling this story as well. I think that is the strongest case I can make for seeing play – the creativity of a lot of the artists is showcased in unbelievable ways.
Speaking of the acting and playing multiple roles, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there as far as multiple generations of a family, and playing down the line and seeing how that evolves.
Torney: There’s one really fascinating strand of identity running through the play, which is Jewish identity. We partnered with the Breman Museum, which is a Jewish organization here in Atlanta. They’ve got two main exhibitions, one is a Holocaust memorial, and the second is a museum about contemporary Jewish life in the south. They hold the archives for Jewish culture for Georgia and Alabama.
The Jewish immigrant experience was actually incredibly diverse. You had folks who changed their names and assimilated, you had folks who adhered to Orthodox traditions and held onto them really tightly. You had folks who lived quiet, middle class lives, who became industrialists. It’s a vast canvas, and actually deeply misunderstood. In this play, we see a series of Jewish men who started as lower middle class tailors, and went on this extraordinary journey. But with each generation, there’s a change in the relationship to their culture. With the first brother who passes away, they sit Shiva for seven days and observe all of the original traditions. And then as each brother dies, they sit Shiva for less and less time.
I think that idea of assimilation, of identity – at what point do you stop being from somewhere else and become American? What do you gain? What do you sacrifice? What is that tension? A generation replacing a generation – these are the things that make the story interesting, more than just the economic history. These really human questions.
Could you talk about finding the right chemistry with the casting. Everyone is playing different parts and has different relationships to each other at different points, so I wondered if you could talk about finding the right combination.
Torney: There were a couple of things that were really important to us in the casting process. The first was, we were very conscious of wanting to work with people who had a connection with Judaism, either because they were Jewish themselves or had worked in Jewish culture. I do think that there’s something these days about people telling their own stories, or stories that are deeply connected to them. It just so happens that Atlanta is full of both incredible actors and incredible Jewish actors. I think two-thirds of the cast are people that grew up Jewish in Atlanta, and the creative team, there’s a heavy representation there. That was one consideration, a real rich, deep cultural connection to the material. Then the second was, each of the brothers represents a kind of archetype in the script. They original brothers are identified as a head, an arm, and a potato – someone who has the ideas, someone who implements the ideas, and then someone who makes it fun [laughs]. You know, that kind of human element. We really were looking for an extraordinary trio. With the talent in Atlanta, we could have cast the play many times over. What we did is we basically just got everybody who was a finalist together in the room and had them mix and match, and read scenes together, and just looked for that chemistry and that connection.
I cannot say enough incredible things about these three actors. Eric Mendenhall, Andrew Benator, and Brian Kurlander. They are just three of the finest actors, not just in Atlanta, but that I’ve ever worked with. They walked in on the first day of rehearsal completely off book. No scripts in their hands. That shows the seriousness with which actors in Atlanta take their craft. There are other cities that are known for their theater communities, but there’s something, especially about the acting community here in Atlanta that always amazes me. As the artistic director at Theatrical Outfit, I make sure we make that a central part of our programming, making sure we’ve got amazing opportunities for local actors to do the same. But these three actors, they arrived on day one ready to go
You mentioned the Breman partnership briefly earlier. Could you elaborate on what exactly that entailed and how they contributed?
Torney: We partnered with the Breman last year on an absolutely incredible production called “Remember This.” It’s a play about a Polish man who brought the first news of the Holocaust to the West, and no one believed him. It is just this extraordinary story about, as history moves, what is truth? What is the moral responsibility that people have for one another? What the Breman really brought to that collaboration with their deep knowledge of the Holocaust. Their staff are incredible. They brought Holocaust survivors to the show. We did programming together, we organized trips to the museum. And they were in the room helping us get it right, and helping us be really true to the historical figures.
For this partnership, it’s very much about the other part of their museum, what’s called [History with] Chutzpah, which is about contemporary Jewish life in the South. We wanted to use this as an opportunity to invite Jewish Atlantans to come and participate in stories about the intersection of Jewishness and Americanness, and doing that with a partner that had deep cultural knowledge of these things just felt very wise. They’ve been helping us pretty much at every stage of the process: interpreting the script, breaking it down, dramaturgical support in the room. Rabbi Joe [Prass] from the Breman has [helped us] to really be very specific about any Hebrew that is spoken, about the specificity of any religious rituals and traditions that are observed in the play, just that we get that kind of deep connection and deep and careful understanding of this play and what it means – so that it’s not somebody thinking they understand the culture and falling into tropes.
They’ve also helped us with dramaturgical materials. We’ve got a couple of wonderful displays in the lobby. They’re showcasing some pieces from their collection, and there are some dramaturgical materials in the program as well. And of course, we’re encouraging everybody who’s inspired and interested by themes of the play to go and see the [History with] Chutzpah exhibit. It’s right over there in Midtown, and it’s just fantastic.
This article has been updated with the full name of the Breman’s History with Chutzpah exhibit and Rabbi Joe Prass.
