Almost everyone paying attention knows the Lehman family went from rags (in their case raw cotton) to riches and then collapsed into bankruptcy in 2008, dragging the national economy with it.
Following an arc from the beginning of the Lehman business interests in 1844, the how, and particularly the why, of the Lehman Brothers story is explored in a British National Theatre production — written by the Italian playwright Stefano Massini, and adapted by Ben Power — that opens on Broadway this month under the direction of Sam Mendes. We hear tickets to The Lehman Trilogy are more expensive than the average high-price seats, perhaps because the story strikes American theatergoers very close to home. The National Theatre staging of the drama was screened at Guild Hall in the fall.
In three acts and three and a half hours, on a spartan stage with an avant-garde cube that rotates, we see the founding members of the Lehman Brothers empire (Henry, Emanuel, and Mayer), who are the only speaking characters. It is a tour de force of brilliant acting by Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles, and Adam Godley. They not only inhabit their principal roles but take on myriad personas, telling us a story about three immigrant brothers from Bavaria who were able to move from being merchants of cotton in Alabama to selling coffee and tobacco, and, eventually, becoming merchants of money. The theatricality of the play is enhanced from time to time by Candida Caldicot at the piano keyboard.
Having been riveted by The Lehman Trilogy, and thinking about the rise and fall of business empires, I was struck by a story in the business section of last Friday’s New York Times about the McClatchy Company, which publishes more than 28 daily newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee and Miami Herald. Its headline was “Bankruptcy Plan Is to Put Lender in Publisher’s Seat.”
It turns out that McClatchy is $700 million in debt. The chain’s major shareholder is the hedge fund company Chatham Asset Management; in other words, the publishing company is under the control of Wall Street investors.
East Hampton Star readers are familiar with our braggadocio. It hasn’t always been easy, but The Star has remained an independent, family-owned newspaper for some 135 years. We take William Wordsworth’s admonition to heart about laying waste one’s powers by getting and spending.
Despite President Trump’s high-pitched pronouncements that, thanks to him, our economy has never been better, some observers fear that various dark shadows — more trouble in the Middle East, the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak, not to mention the globe’s precarious environmental situation — may be leading us to a precipitous fall.
Let’s make sure we are not headed for a one-man Trump Trilogy.
“It’s never felt so important to be questioning the economic systems that run our societies,” said Ben Power, who adapted the play for American audiences after it was first shown in London. Amen.