By Sherrie Rose in San Diego
As audiences take their seats at Cygnet Theatre, they’re immediately pulled into a world already in motion: stock prices flicker across the walls, the year 2008 looms, and the collapse that impacted global finance is foreshadowed before a single line is spoken.
This digital layer becomes an essential narrative device with dual-wall projections, tracing the 164-year arc of the Lehman family and their company through dates, archival imagery, and subtle lighting shifts. The production runs three and a half hours, with two intermissions, yet maintains a steady sense of momentum.
The masterful staging relies on minimal props, keeping attention fixed on the storytelling. Part family saga, part capitalism primer, part cultural evolution, it chronicles a small immigrant business as it expands into a financial empire.
The first act opens in 1844 with Chaim/Henry Lehman (Bruce Turk) arriving in America. In Montgomery, Alabama, he works to pay off his debt and transforms a modest clothing store into a trading post. His younger brothers Mendel/Emanuel (Steven Lone) and Mayer (Jacob Caltrider) follow in intervals from Rimpar, Bavaria, and together the three build a business buying raw cotton from the plantations that rely on slave labor.
Jewish tradition is woven through every act. The words “Baruch Hashem” (Blessed be God), Kaddish (the mourner’s prayer, without mentioning death), and the mourning periods of Shiva and Shloshim recur like a ritual refrain. Henry, who died in 1855 prior to the Civil War was deeply committed to his faith, and his younger brothers honored that devotion long after his passing.
As Alabama is abandoned for New York, Mayer dies in 1897 and Emanuel in 1907. With each generation, their sons and grandsons shed more of the family’s deeply rooted Jewish European identity. And with each change to the final words on the Lehman Brothers’ company sign, the enterprise drifts further from the business of buying and selling tangible things like cotton and coffee and deeper into the abstract realm of pure finance.
The three actors — Bruce, Steve, and Jacob — remain in their original tailored three-piece frock coat suits throughout all three acts. Through shifts in voice and accent, they brilliantly portray the founding brothers along with successive generations of the family. Each actor is remarkable in how they take on multiple roles in a seamless and believable way, including descendants such as Philip Lehman (son of Emanuel), Herbert Lehman (son of Mayer), and Robert Lehman (son of Philip), as well as a range of minor characters as wives are acquired, children born, and business associates join the firm, all while the family’s history unfolds.
Act Two ends with Lehman Brothers no longer a family mercantile operation but a fully embedded Wall Street institution on the brink of modern corporate finance, investing in ventures like DEC computers, the Panama Canal, and railroads.
“The Immortal,” the third act, follows the firm’s final, increasingly volatile decades. The last blood descendant to actively run Lehman Brothers was Robert “Bobby” Lehman, who died in 1969 at age 77. His final scene — dancing the Twist on top of a table — is both joyful and elegiac. His death marked the end of direct family control, and with it, the last tether between the firm and its human origins. What remained moved steadily toward high-risk abstraction and soulless capitalism. The last act seems rushed moving through 40 years as the new trading division’s profits soar.
One hundred and sixty-four years after Henry Lehman first set foot in Alabama, in 2008, Lehman Brothers, a firm in name only, collapses spectacularly into bankruptcy, triggering the largest financial crisis in modern history.
Winner of the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play. Based on the book by Stefano Massini, translated from Italian.
Cygnet Theatre’s production of The Lehman Trilogy runs through April 26 at the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Performing Arts Center in Liberty Station.
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Sherrie Rose is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego.