‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at ACT: Phenomenal Acting, But Too Kind to Finance

The Lehman Trilogy, which opened at A.C.T. Wednesday in San Francisco, is a three-and-a-half hour tour de force of impeccable acting talent. On Broadway, it won five Tony Awards, including Best Play. It is a thrill to watch. It will also evaporate your faith in this country’s financial system, and the willingness of theater to challenge its abuses.

A chronological telling of the Lehman Brothers as both a family and a company, the play opens in 1844, when Henry Lehman arrives in New York from Bavaria. Filled with reverence for the promise of America, he moves to Montgomery, Alabama, and is soon joined by his brothers Emanuel and Mayer, who help run the Lehman general store.

Over three acts, the Lehmans serve as a proxy for a history of U.S. finance. Slavery, the Civil War, various tragedies and downturns — the Lehmans, as middlemen, find a way to profit from all of it. They go from buying and selling commodities to investing their millions into industry, technology and, ultimately, the intangible concept of investing itself. (As one character bellows: “Money is a ghost! Money is numbers! Money is air!”)

Every actor on stage delivers jaw-dropping performances. In The Lehman Trilogy’s masterclass, actors John Hefferman, Aaron Krohn and Howard W. Overshown play their roles, narrate the action, occupy new characters and impersonate others, often in the same 10-second span. With exact pacing from famed director Sam Mendes, and a taut script by Stefano Massini, these are experts at their craft. The set design by Es Devlin is similarly dazzling — a plain office of boxes and furniture on a turntable, constantly and imaginatively transformed against a semicircle of projected backdrops.

But at the end of each act, I had to ask myself: Where is any sort of indictment for the Lehmans’ rampant greed and exploitation?

As a Horatio Alger story of the opportunity of America, The Lehman Trilogy too often lionizes rather than criticizes the firm that played a leading role in the financial collapse and subsequent Great Recession. It jumps from the 1960s to 2008 in a short matter of minutes, skipping entirely over the Reagan era, deregulation, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, adjustable rate mortgages, credit default swaps, foreclosed homes and the many who suffered and died at the hands of Wall Street run amok.

I repeat: the acting is astonishing. But while the play’s final image on stage is mesmerizing, after three and a half hours of humanizing the Lehman Brothers firm, the play doesn’t present its bankruptcy and collapse as comeuppance so much as a sad loss of one family’s American dream.

Thousands of other American families, meanwhile, would like a word.

‘The Lehman Trilogy’ runs through June 23 at the Toni Rembe Theater in San Francisco. Details here.