Tony Award winning play, ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ comes to Calgary: Oct. 15 – Nov. 3

by Irena Karshenbaum

(AJNews) – Those who follow financial news — and have a good memory — may recall that the illustrious global investment bank, Lehman Brothers, was ranked as the “#1 Most Admired Securities Firm” by Fortune magazine in 2007. Just two years earlier, its assets under management had reached $175 billion, a staggering sum in 2005. Yet this was no indication of its actual financial health when on September 15, 2008, the 158-year-old firm suddenly declared bankruptcy, the largest in U.S. history. The failure caused a financial crises around the world, triggering the Great Recession.

An American dream had turned into an American tragedy and the idea of too-big-to-fail proved worthless — like the subprime mortgages Lehman Brothers were peddling in their final days. Creative financing, however, was at the root of the firm’s success stemming from its earliest days.

In 1844, Bavarian-born, Henry Lehman, the oldest of the Lehman brothers, settled in Montgomery, Alabama where he opened a general store. By the early 1850s, brothers, Emanuel and Mayer Lehman, joined him founding Lehman Brothers and the trio started trading cotton for cash, becoming brokers for buyers and sellers of the crop that they received as currency to settle merchandise accounts from local farmers. In 1858, the brothers opened an office in America’s commodity trading centre, New York City, where they helped to establish the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870.

Lehman Brothers played a key role in financing major American companies that fuelled the country’s financial growth and prosperity. This work included financing railroad construction in the 1860s; emerging retailers such as Sears, Roebuck & Company and R.H. Macy & Company at the turn of the 20th century; film studios such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox in the 1920s; DuMont, the first television manufacturer, in the 1930s; Hertz Rent-a-Car and advised Ford Motor Company, numerous airlines and consumer companies, such as General Foods and Campbell Soup, in the 1960s. Nearly four decades after the 1969-passing of Robert Lehman, the last family member to lead the firm, Lehman Brothers work was largely focused on underwriting corporate debt, mergers and acquisitions and acquiring such companies as Neuberger Berman, a wealth and asset management firm — straying far from its early work of growing wealth-creating businesses, which ultimately led to its demise.

The remarkable rags-to-riches-to-rags story caught the eye of Italian writer, Stefano Massini, who as a child went to a Catholic school in the mornings and Hebrew school in the afternoons, and wrote a prose poem about the saga called, Qualcosa sui Lehman. The work was translated into English by Richard Dixon as, The Lehman Trilogy, and adapted by playwright, Ben Power. The play has since been translated into twenty-four languages, performed around the world including on Broadway and London’s West End, and in 2022 won five Tony Awards, including the Best Play prize.

From October 15 to November 3, 2024, The Lehman Trilogy will be presented by Theatre Calgary and performed by three Canadian Jewish actors — Diane Flacks (Mayer Lehman), Alex Poch-Goldin (Emanuel Lehman) and Michael Rubenfeld (Henry Lehman) — who will also be playing the parts of twenty-two other characters divided between them over thirty-two scenes.

Interviewed between rehearsals, the actors discussed the production with Rubenfeld describing jumping in and out of different characters as not being as difficult if thinking of it in “micro parts.”

Rubenfeld explained why the play is important today saying that we, in North America, forget where we come from, “We all come here with these dreams, but we have these connections to these older countries. With the Lehman Brothers, it’s this story of these three brothers that have come from Germany, that were connected to a set of values, that were connected to a version of religiosity and these things all got lost or overtaken by what we might call, capitalism. I think it’s this reminder that our histories keep us rooted to our cultural identities and when we aren’t connected to our histories, it’s hard to know where to hang our identity hat on. This is where capitalism becomes this beast of a machine that really gets in there with its claws and it’s a reminder that our values are more than money. The play is exploring those tensions.”

Poch-Goldin addressed the old antisemitic trope of Jews and money, which hovers like a canopy over the play, “The American Dream is people coming to try to make better lives for themselves, to make more money, but somehow Jews are saddled with it because they were forced to be money-lenders. If you want to go back to Judas and thirty pieces of silver, you can find lots of ways of connecting Jews with money in negative ways.”

Flacks added, “It’s definitely a tension in the play and it’s definitely something that we’ve talked about in rehearsal,” continuing to explain that the actors feel grateful that this production is made up of a Jewish cast. “We can talk about these issues and not feel ‘othered’ and that we can actually confront some of it head on to make sure that we are telling a story that is an important story, but also not fall into tropes that are problematic or harmful to us.”

Poch-Goldin explained that a lot of productions of this play have been done without Jewish actors “which creates its own dilemma and skirts over things that they don’t understand or don’t want to discuss.”

Despite the play addressing some serious themes, Flacks concluded saying that The Lehman Trilogy is “funny. It has a lot of energy. It has beautiful artistic design, so it will feel like an epic and quite massive in scope, but hopefully the audiences will enjoy themselves.”

 Irena Karshenbaum is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter. She writes in Calgary. irenakarshenbaum.com