Guthrie’s three-act ‘Lehman Trilogy’ charts one immigrant family’s epic rise and catastrophic fall

The Lehman Brothers financial empire rose, over a century and a half, like a phantom before collapsing and disappearing like a ghost.

The family’s history becomes an emblem of dreaming and a cautionary tale in “The Lehman Trilogy,” a multigenerational play that tracks the story from 19th-century Europe to America. The Lehmans’ success would peak by 2008, when the family’s namesake behemoth banking concern would cause global hurt and a loss of faith in the financial system.

Adapted by Ben Power from Stefano Massini’s play, “Lehman” underscores one of the principal narratives about America as the land where someone with a strong work ethic can realize their wildest dreams. But what are the costs and sacrifices of such success? And how much money is too much?

“Lehman,” now up at the Guthrie Theater, has been celebrated for its heft and scope. Deadline called the Broadway production, directed by Englishman Sam Mendes, “spellbinding.” Arin Arbus, who is staging it in Minneapolis, directed “Lehman” at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre in February.

She admired Mendes’ vision for the show, which she saw before the pandemic at the New York Armory, but recalled thinking: “This production is a play about us, and it needs an American production with an American perspective and an American understanding of history.”

Pamela Nadell, who is the Jewish cultural consultant, agrees that the show touches on fundamental ways that we see ourselves. The phrase “the American dream” didn’t become popular until the Depression, Nadell said, but the Lehmans believed in it long before it was a thing.

They knew it was “the land of opportunity,” Nadell said, adding that the dreams are powerful motivators even as they become nightmares.

Although an epic, “Lehman” is told with just three actors. Will Sturdivant, who played one of the three kings in the Guthrie’s marathon History Plays in spring, plays about a dozen roles in the cast plus the narrator.

The Minnesota Star Tribune caught up with Arbus, Nadell and Sturdivant before a technical rehearsal last week. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: First things first, how would you describe “The Lehman Trilogy”?

Arbus: I think the play is a capitalist critique. It tells this amazing epic story that begins with three Jewish brothers fleeing oppression and coming to America, seeking more opportunity and a better life. They start small but from almost the beginning they settle in Montgomery, Ala., and they get into cotton. Slavery is really the beginning of capitalism in America. And you trace that line into the end of the family line at the 2008 financial crisis.

Sturdivant: I think of capitalism the way we think of weapons of war. Every new invention means a new necessity for capitalism to be satiated in a new way. But it’s never fulfilled.

Q: What was it like to have just three actors play scores of quick-change roles?

Sturdivant: The narrator is my biggest role. There’s a different sort of power that you can have as a narrator in terms of connecting with the audience and bringing them to you. We’re in that beautiful Wurtele Thrust. It craves this work. We are the campfire on the stage and everyone is just leaning in to warm themselves and hear these stories.

Q: The New York production had a live pianist. What can we expect music-wise in Minneapolis?

Arbus: We don’t have live music. Michael Costagliola, our sound designer, picked an instrument for each of the characters: piano, violin and a wind instrument, maybe an oboe. There are all of these repetitions — phrases that come back — throughout the language. Michael has built these beautiful leitmotifs or sound cues. Throughout the piece, characters often feel a breeze caress their ear in a heightened moment.

Q: Three-and-a-half hours plus two intermissions. What do you say to people who fear that’s a big commitment?

Arbus: It actually feels very fast as it spins out from one brother arriving in America and wanting to open a shop, which is something he’s not allowed to do in Bavaria because he is Jewish. If we do our jobs right, you blink and suddenly we’re into this capitalist mania.

Sturdivant: It’s storytelling that moves fast. And it starts in the first two minutes when you’re being told a story by someone who becomes another character talking to himself.

Q: Pamela, as a Jewish cultural consultant, what were some of the tropes and canards you had to guard against?

Nadell: The play has been criticized with the question about why if we are focusing on the Lehmans, are we perpetuating this classic stereotype of Jews being manipulators of money. This is the third time I’ve consulted on this play. I know that the other productions, at least the London production, had a rabbi consultant. I’m not really worried about one story about one Jewish family that really encapsulates what becomes the American dream. The issue with the play is that it has so much Jewish content that audiences can get really lost.

Q: Can you give an example?

Nadell: At the opening night party at the Timeline Theater in Chicago, someone turned to me and said, what is “Baruch Hashem,” which is in the sixth line of the play. And when I explained what that was (“Blessed is God”), they got it. There’s a lot in the play that’s Jewish, a lot about the loss of Jewish traditions.

Q: Which gets us to the bigger question: do you have to give up and possibly lose everything in order to attain the American dream?

Arbus: That’s the crux of the play for me. My great-grandparents, who came from Ireland and Russia-Poland, would’ve journeyed over at the time the Lehmans did. I know little about their journey, but I find them in this play, and the tremendous vision and courage that would’ve been required to go to some foreign land and try and build a better life. You don’t get to Google where you’re going to stay. At the beginning of the story, religion and family are important to them. The fallacy of the American dream is that when immigrant values come in contact with capitalism, those values will influence the forces of capitalism and the immigrants will be uplifted. But what the play is showing is the opposite, how insatiable capitalism is. Over the course of three generations, the religion and traditions in the family erode.

Sturdivant: In the play, capitalism corrodes the moral fabric of individuals but also the ties that bind a family. We just watch this family lose their traditions. What’s left is a corporation that’s broken up, divided and sold away. There’s not a Lehman family there. It shows you warning signs and reminds you how important it is to keep a strong core.

Who: Adapted by Ben Power from Stefano Massini’s play. Directed by Arin Arbus.

Where: Guthrie Theater, 818 S. 2nd St., Mpls.

When: 7 p.m. Wed.-Fri., 12:30 & 7 p.m. Sat., 7 p.m. Sun. Ends Oct. 13.

Tickets: $29 to $83. 612-377-2224, www.guthrietheater.org.