The Lehman Trilogy is in three acts. It features three actors. It spans three centuries, but there are also three ways of looking at the play: as a family drama about the American Dream, as a Shakespearean History Play of our present times, and as a modern-day Greek Tragedy.

In 1844, Henry (née Hayum) Lehman arrived at the Port of New York, an immigrant from Rimpar, Bavaria, in modern-day Germany. In 1850, Henry would be joined by Emanuel (née Mendel) and Mayer, and the three would found the Lehman Brothers dry-goods store. 

The story of three brothers connected by fraternal and business ties is the first tale told in The Lehman Trilogy. Their lives, as imagined by playwright Stefano Massini and adaptor Ben Power, working in a poetic, Homeric-Shakespearean mode, take the arc of an intimate, all-American story. We learn of the brothers' different personalities, of their ambitions to make a success through hard work, and of the rifts that ultimately drive them and their descendants apart, leading to the downfall of their empire. As the brothers die, through the magic of the theatre, their ghosts remain. The three actors who play them embody dozens of other characters across generations and genders. But Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer are somehow always present within this spectral structure, embodying and bearing witness. 

The second narrative contained within the play involves the materials that the brothers sell, offering a window into the evolution of American markets. In this sense, the play resembles a Shakespearean history play, one in which the main character is capital itself. Over the course of 163 years, what began as a "fabric and suits" store becomes a bank and, finally, a corporation. At each step, capital becomes increasingly abstract and depersonalized, estranged from the sources of its own production. We start in a world of denim and dry-goods, suits and cotton. We end up in a world of credit swaps. Just as the three brothers become spirits, so, too, do the things they trade lose their material forms, melting from solid substances into thin air, an insubstantial pageant faded.

The original Lehman Brothers store was located in Montgomery, Alabama, where it traded in cotton fabric. The Lehmans, who built their business off the "Empire of Cotton," were directly implicated in the evils of American slavery, which exploited Black lives and plundered the monetary fruits of Black labor. Cotton boomed during the Antebellum period, becoming known as a "cash crop" and driving the second Industrial Revolution around the world. It also enabled financial capitals in the north to grow with amazing speed. After the Civil War, the Lehman brothers' business shifted to New York and a nascent Wall Street, where they traded money itself, in the form of paper currency. By 2008, the Lehman Brothers corporation was a major player in the market of "credit default swaps," particular types of "derivative" transactions in which no underlying goods are exchanged, only concepts at multiple levels of remove, derived from the thing itself.

In 1844—the same year Henry Lehman arrived in America—another German expatriate, Karl Marx, met Friedrich Engels in Paris. Four years later, the two friends would write The Communist Manifesto, a document seeking to describe the way capitalism transforms social relations. “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx and Engels write, "all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." 

Even though the play tells the story of the last 163 years through the lens of a single family, the play's imagery is informed by Marx's quasi-messianic metaphor of capitalist transfiguration. In the play, a tightrope walker suddenly plummets from the sky. A house of cards teeters on the verge of collapse. At various points, the brothers feel gentle breezes rustling against their cheeks. All these images evoke the butterfly effect of sudden economic evaporation, that moment when immaterial things, suddenly forced to become manifest, disappear, as if by magic.

The third way of seeing the play—one approaching classical tragedy—follows the brothers' trajectory as immigrants on their path to assimilation. Massini and Power render the brothers' Jewish identities as central to this process. As members of a marginalized community, like countless immigrants before them, the Lehmans dream of success while also seeking to maintain a hold on their heritage. But successful assimilation, the play seems to imply, has its end in alienation and tragedy.

Throughout the play, we hear in-vocations of the Hebrew God and the mourner's Kaddish. Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer are religiously observant, sitting shiva when one of the brothers dies. This ritual is repeated three times, in three different acts, allowing the audience to see how identity itself is a historical process, subject to change like anything else. Prophetic visions visit the brothers and their descendants in the shape of Jewish holidays: Hanukkah, Shavuot, Sukkot. Old Testament para-bles foretell historical events. The inequities of the American capitalist system are likened to the ten plagues of Passover, the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the Flood, and the Lehman Brothers' collapse to the Tower of Babel. 

As the family's wealth increases, their connection to Jewish tradition—their cultural heritage—begins to fade. Over the course of the play, the brothers' initial pursuit of success results in their assimilation into the American way of life. And, as the arguments among their descendants make clear, the Lehmans come to pursue multiple different versions of the American dream. For some, it means life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For others, justice, equality, and democracy for all. No resolution is offered to these conflicts within the play. It is a story still being told offstage in our ongoing American narrative. The present marches on. History is just a means of organizing our ignorance of the past.

On September 15, 2008, 163 years after Henry Lehman's arrival, the Lehman Brothers company filed for bankruptcy, claiming more than $600 billion in debts. The catastrophe would consume the family name- even though no Lehmans had been working there for decades. The ensuing economic crisis threatened to engulf the entire world and usher in a new era of political uncertainty. The Lehman Trilogy, with its three intertwining perspectives, illuminates how these larger forces continue to shape our world.