IN THE BEGINNING
The biggest corporate crash in US history began in 1844 on a ship from Bavaria. Heyum Lehmann arrived in America, leaving his name and his homeland behind him. All but forced to leave his hometown of Rimpar, Bavaria due to anti-Semitic occupational and residential restrictions in Germany, the newly Ellis Island-christened Henry Lehman would travel as a peddler south to Montgomery, and become part of the thriving cotton trade–built on the backs of the enslaved people on Alabama plantations–as the owner of a general store. Henry was soon followed by his two younger brothers, Emanuel (née Mendel) and Mayer (Maier), who joined him in business, bringing about the beginning of Lehman Brothers.
Their business morphed from cash based retail to credit to brokerage and they expanded their growing reach to New York. After Henry’s untimely death in 1855, the post-Civil War Lehman Brothers continued to grow from brokerage to investment bank with Emanuel and Mayer eventually moving the entire operation to New York City, where they took an active role in the development of futures exchanges. Though the Civil War and the 1929 stock market crash did not leave Lehman Brothers unscathed, the organization survived and would eventually become the fourth largest investment bank in the United States and a financial superpower.
As unregulated markets grew, so too did predatory lending and excessive risk. Consumer debt skyrocketed and when the early 2000’s housing bubble finally burst, the collapse of Lehman Brothers– and the following Chapter 11 filing involving more than $600 billion in assets– became the biggest bank failure in history and the catalyst for the 2008 financial crash and Great Recession.
WRITING THE STORY OF CAPITALISM
Following the 2008 crash, Italian playwright Stefano Massini found himself asking “how we got to where we are” and looking to the history of the crash’s first casualty for answers. After three and a half years of writing (most of it via voice recording on his bicycle as he traversed the Tuscan countryside), he held a script– written more as an epic poem than with any sort of dramatic structure– under the original Italian working title: I Capitoli del Crollo (The Chapters of the Collapse). It was first broadcast as a nine-hour radio play on Italy’s Rai Radio 3 in 2012. The popularity of the script grew as it was translated into French and produced as a large cast, five hour drama premiering in Paris in 2013 before moving back to Italy for an Italian stage premiere in Milan in 2015. In 2016, Massini’s work was published as a novel under the title Qualcosa sui Lehman.
When English playwright Ben Power, at that time Deputy Artistic Director of the National Theatre in London, got a call from director Sam Mendes about adapting Massini’s script into a new English version, Power immediately called Massini for a meeting. He was welcomed into the writer’s Tuscan home where he says Massini was “generous and entertaining, full of stories and extra material” and was given approval to adapt the script however he saw fit. Mendes and Power labored over the script and concept from 2016 through 2018 , workshopping the play with 15 actors before brainstorming the idea to pare the entire 160 years of family history down to three actors, a pianist, and one set. Now set in three swiftly moving acts, the play sends viewers on a roller coaster of boom and bust, war and peace, and American dreams and devastation.
About the massive undertaking ending with this epic, essentials-only production, Mendes says “There’s a great line from Christopher Marlowe about ‘infinite riches in a little room,’ and I use the same line about theater. It has an endless capacity to convey a huge amount with very little.”
See North Carolina Stage Company’s production of The Lehman Trilogy from March 13- April 6. at 15 Stage Lane in downtown Asheville, NC.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entries/mayer-lehman/
https://www.vogue.com/article/sam-mendes-lehman-trilogy-broadway
