Maltz’s Lehman Trilogy Depicts Generations Who See Selves As “Merchants of Money”

The brothers’ businnes is beginning to fall apart in The Lehman Trilogy at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre (Photos by Jason Nuttle)

By Bill Hirschman

The Lehman Trilogy is a biography of America itself.

It’s the journey of a country pursuing a Dream viewed through the prism of financial acquisition, following generations of an immigrant family rising to economic triumph – and then tragedy.

But the family – standing in for our society as a whole — has built its sense of self-worth primarily on fiscal success, even to the dilution of its morality, its loyalty even its cultural history.

The Maltz Jupiter Theatre’s production nimbly delivers the personal and social complexities examined in one of this country’s most challenging dramas in recent years.

But beyond the thought-provoking and painfully resonating script, the work provides a field day for the creativity and imagination of a director, designers, production team and three actors playing nearly 50 characters over 164 years from the original three brothers to their descendants, colleagues and spouses.

Woven through it are a simultaneous sense of admiration for their grit, determination and ingenuity, along with a criticism of what they and this country sacrificed as it evolved. While the family finds ways to overcome and even profit from the fiscal disasters of the Civil War and the 1929 stock market crash, its single-minded unfettered devotion to money dooms it to an inevitable annihilating tragedy.

It reminds us what the American Dream once was, what we wanted the future to be as a place that provides opportunities and rewards to all those with the courage to pursue them.

And by creating its heroes as three Bavarian Jews arriving in Alabama in 1844, the play in the 21st Century echoes that these forefathers of present-day Americans are immigrants.

This odyssey is roughly based on the real Lehman family’s rise and fall. It begins when the oldest son Heyum — renamed Henry at Ellis Island — arrives euphoric at the opportunities he sees.

He quickly moves to Montgomery, Alabama, where he opens the kind of modest fabric clothing retail store the family operated in Bavaria. Soon his younger brothers Emanuel and Mayer arrive.

Together, they tirelessly find ways to expand both in size and diversity, such as buying raw cotton locally to sell to material manufacturers in New York. But they blur their eyes at the fact that they are thriving based on an industry dependent on slavery.

Over the decades, they and their scions expand exponentially, often taking chances with original thinking about the financial framework. Eventually, they are running their own bank in New York City, becoming a pillar of the economic environment with expanding interests in iron, coffee, coal and railroads. But their stability, their future relies on using the pure acquisition of money as their guidestar.

A key Lehman, Philip, instructs that their basis “is neither coffee nor coal nor cotton nor the steel of the railroad tracks. We are the merchants of money…. We use money to make money.”

The country’s economic infrastructure becomes increasingly complicated; when the company crashes and dissolves in 2008, it creates a financial crisis across this country and its international network.

Much of the story-telling is delivered directly to the audience, often peppered with lyrical phrases and wry humor, although the dialogue scenes are staged as if a scene from a play before an audience.

Threaded throughout the text is the family’s Judaism, from frequently uttering Baruch Hashem (roughly ‘Thanks to God’) to lighting the Hannukah candles to reciting the Kaddish at family funerals. (A hat tip to Avi Hoffman for coaching the actors). But true to the play’s theme, their practicing religion erodes until it nearly disappears over the decades.

The playwrights print the script as phrases divided by slashes, so that it encourages a nearly poetic rhythm that builds in potency such as one brother’s nightmare about crushing branches being piled on the traditional ceremonial booth on Sukkot.

And when Henry arrives in New York, he enthuses, “Seen up close / on this cold September morning / America moved like a musical box. / For every window that closed / another would open. / For every cart that vanished around a corner / another would appear. / For every customer who got up from a table / another would sit down.”

The play, reportedly translated to 24 languages, has become one of the most produced in this country. Perhaps it’s because of its quality and its potential for imaginatively different visual production values, but also because it only requires three actors, a single set, few costumes and props. In just the past year in Florida, it has already been produced to universal praise at GableStage, Gulfshore Playhouse and Florida Studio Theatre.

The play had its own journey. Italian novelist and playwright Stefano Massini wrote a five-hour version in 2013, which was translated into French and then staged in France. A three-hour English translation adapted by Ben Power bowed at England’s National Theatre in 2018 to acclaim. That production with its British cast transferred to Broadway in 2020 but shut down quickly because of COVID. It reopened in 2021, winning five Tony awards including Best Play.

The three-hour-plus production spread over three acts and two intermissions rarely flags because director Peter Flynn and his three actors send it hurtling through the evening. One brother says, “Stopping is never allowed.”

With virtually no stage directions in the script, Flynn is free to move characters interacting both vocally and visually. He adds scores of tiny imaginative moments such as when the body of a recently deceased brother is covered by his siblings with a shroud made of financial reports.

David Studwell, Jeremy Rishe and Noah Keyishian

Which backs into the outstanding cast that propels the evening with power and skill. Using accents and physical agility, they make the many characters both relatively distinct for the audience’s benefit but with no attempt to disappear away from their principal narrator roles. But being played by the same actors, there is a sense of unity, even echoing the play’s applicability to the entire country’s populace of each decade.

David Studwell captivates the audience immediately as Henry, the immigrant whose enthusiasm for possibilities swells upon landing in New York City. Studwell employs a dozen accents over the evening in convincingly portraying an array of citizenry, often with only a line or two of dialogue to establish them. He did struggle a bit with the avalanche of words dumped on him by the encyclopedia of a script, but his own skill and that of his colleagues covering for him kept the pace. As one Maltz employee noted, on Broadway you get five to eight weeks before opening night, here you get three.

Noah Keyishian inhabits Emanuel, the often quarrelsome brother whose energy propels the company after Henry’s death. Keyishian brings power and presence to each of the many characters he has to deliver – bur also with a conscious teasing. Consistent with most previous productions, Keyishian is Black, expanding even further the sense that the themes cross ethnicities.

Jeremy Rishe’s Mayer is the politic peacemaker between the other two brothers. But he also creates a descendant with the most insight in the family’s expansion in the future of media, aviation and technology. He easily switches from the even-tempered grinning Mayer Lehman to a smooth partying 20th Century relative.

All three smoothly meld, interchange, support each other in an endlessly intricate dance.

The Milagros Ponce de Leon’s set covering the Maltz stage overwhelms from the moment the audience files in to see three stage-high concrete pillars leaning at an angle to telegraph from the start that the Lehmans’ reign is built on problematic ground and cannot withstand the ravages of time.

She sets an age-indeterminate boardroom table, chairs, crates and side pieces worthy of a Wall Street conference room. It is backed by a curved projection screen whose images by Shawn Duan transport the tale from era to era. Initially, we see the towers of modern Manhattan with buildings sliding into the environment. As was done on Broadway, Duan skillfully replaces a wall of cotton when it is the basis of the Lehman’s initial business and then illustrates it burning up with the threat of doing the same to the Lehmans.

Special note is due lighting designer Alberto Segarra who continually keeps the byplay of light and shadow, spotlights and darkness as eloquent as the script.

Siena Zoe Allen obeys the script’s suggestion to keep the basic clothes always of the 19th century regardless of the period being depicted with tiny changes. Alex Brock’s choice of sound clips is somehow more realistic than usual, perhaps because her sound design itself is flawless. It’s almost impossible to believe there are microphones anywhere. Ian Weinberger has provided an evocative piano score to underpin the events.

The third act and a few other spots could use a trim. The speed at which it travels makes the intricate turnovers and handoffs very difficult to follow in the last 15 minutes – which may have been the metaphoric intent of the playwrights and the director.

Whether the playwrights are lauding the Lehmans or warning us of our shared flaws or both, that’s for you to decide.

A side note: I likely should have apologized for semi-loudly scolding the two thoughtless, self-indulgent women – not ladies – sitting across the aisle who spoke non-stop through much of the second act. But I didn’t.

Second side note: To be as diplomatic as I can, the intermissions need to be a bit longer. Ask the long line of people trying to get into the bathrooms.

The Lehman Trilogy plays through March 2 at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 East Indiantown Road, Jupiter, FL (immediately east of A1A); Shows are 7:30 p.m. Tues-Fri, 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Wednesday and Sunday. Limited tickets still available. Running time approx. 3 hours 5 minutes plus two intermissions. Tickets $74-$99. Call 561-575-2223, or visit jupitertheatre.org.

Milagros Ponce de Leon’s set design and Shawn Duan;s projections