As their story continues, and the Lehman business moves to New York after the Civil War, those rites, too, will evolve and eventually all but disappear. For like so many American stories that span generations, “The Lehman Trilogy” is a progress of deracination.
At the same time, another kind of rootlessness is being traced. This one is economic. Against a New York that moves from the Gilded Age into the frenzied ’20s, from the Great Depression into the postwar boom of acquisition and beyond, the goods in which the brothers and their descendants traffic become increasingly abstract.
From traders in cotton and coffee — and railroads and tobacco — they become “merchants of money.” And as the firm shifts from banking into the more nebulous ether of high finance, money turns into something intangible, with a mighty but tenuous existence all its own — and ever increased potential to evaporate altogether.
These heady considerations, from the financial and the ontological, are grounded in three of the most virtuosic performances you’re ever likely to see. As they switch among genders, ages and nationalities of their countless characters each actor has his bravura moments.
But, under the supervision of Mr. Mendes (whose command of stagecraft is also on view in the Broadway hit “The Ferryman”), each is also, always the original Lehman brother he first portrays. It is those voices — the sound of history itself — that enfold the particularly rendered scenes of courtship and acquisition, of growing older and dying.
These multifarious beings aren’t all talk, by any means. Those packing crates are enlisted to build walls of stores and institutions, and to be piled into the toppling, smothering towers that haunt the brothers’ nightmares. The glass walls are scrawled upon in marker with names and numbers, and are then wiped clean, leaving barely discernible smudges as reminders of who and what came before.
Not that audiences are likely to forget what they’ve seen. The real magic of “The Lehman Trilogy” has nothing to do with numbers. It’s the miracle of three men, on a nearly naked stage, resurrecting vanished lives and worlds, leaving an oddly indelible afterglow in that final fade into darkness.
