Playwright Ben Power on going beyond Jewish tropes in ‘The Lehman Trilogy’

(Original London and Broadway cast member of “The Lehman Trilogy” Simon Russell Beale will reprise his role in the acclaimed production at Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre March 3 through April 6, 2022. Photo Credit: Julieta Cervantes)

In “The Lehman Trilogy,” now playing at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, Bavarian immigrant Henry Lehman stands on a cold wooden dock at New York harbor in 1844, “a circumcised Jew with only one piece of luggage.”

Lehman is soon joined by his brothers, Emanuel and Mayer. Together, they eventually establish a brokerage firm selling cotton in Montgomery, Ala. They then go on to create a bank in New York, and invest in oil, iron and trains. In 2008, they suffer a cataclysmic bankruptcy that has affected the global economy to this day.

As the play unfolds, the Lehman brothers’ Jewish practice is diluted over the generations. Initially, they utter plenty of “Baruch Hashems” and observe Shabbat and the full laws of shivah, but by the time their grandsons have taken over the business, their shiva ritual has been diminished to just three minutes of silence so that their company can open with the stock exchange on time.

In an interview with the National Theatre, where the play had a successful run in 2018, director Sam Mendes — the Tony and Oscar award-winning director of films such as “American Beauty,” “Road to Perdition” and “1917” — recalled becoming “obsessed” while viewing the iconic television images of Lehman Brothers employees carrying boxes out of their offices when the firm went bust.

When Mendes — whose mother is Jewish with roots in Spain and Portugal — heard of a production of “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, he asked the playwright, Stefano Massini, to send him the piece. The original play was nine hours long, written like an epic poem, with no suggestions as to which characters spoke what lines.

Enter Ben Power, who in 2016 was charged with adapting the show into what would become a three-hour production with only three actors performing dozens of characters inside a glass cube.

L-R: Simon Russell Beale, Howard W. Overshown and Adam Godley will perform in “The Lehman Trilogy” at Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles March 3 through April 10, 2022. Photo credit: Emilio Madrid

In a Zoom interview with SoCal Jewish News from his home in London, Power said he was drawn to the piece because “it’s the story of a family but also of the history of capitalism from the 1840s to the present day, and how the structures we live in in the world were built.”

Power, 40, who was raised in the Church of England, decided his first step would be to visit Massini at his home in Florence, Italy, where the adapter discovered the playwright had a fascinating, if unexpected, Jewish background. Massini, a Roman Catholic, was 9 when his father saved the life of a Jewish employee who had collapsed on his factory’s floor. The worker told Massini that he was Jewish, and because Massini had saved his life, he considered him an honorary Jew, and wanted to know what he could do for his boss in return for saving him. When Massini complained that young Stefano was a terror, the employee said he would enroll Stefano in his synagogue’s religious school. Stefano studied in an Italian school in the morning and at the synagogue in the afternoon. He was a bit of a hellraiser, once opining that the 10 plagues of Egypt were an unfair punishments to the Egyptians. In the play, one of the Lehmans’ descendants says the same thing to his Hebrew school teacher.

Stefano began his directing career with a production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” in 2002 and later with a play he wrote titled “The End of Shavuot.”

“Massini had this very close knowledge of Judaism, but he was also an outsider; he was deeply in it but not in it,” Power said. “The play deals not only with the Lehmans’ Judaism, but also with their status as outsiders. And as a non-Jew, non-American telling this story, I also felt like an outsider.”

Power and Mendes worked with Orthodox Rabbi Daniel Epstein of the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London, who had already served as an adviser on a production of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angels in America.”

 The play deals not only with the Lehmans’ Judaism, but also with their status as outsiders. And as a non-Jew, non-American telling this story, I also felt like an outsider. — Ben Power

Among other things, Epstein helped the actors with certain pronunciations. “They were saying everything in a modern Hebrew pronunciation, but it was not the correct accent from the era and where they came from,” Epstein said in a Zoom interview from London. “A Jew from Rimpar, Germany, in 1844 is not going to speak with a modern Israeli accent. It would be an Ashkenazi Jewish pronunciation with a very thick German accent.”

Epstein also gave the cast some insight into Jewish rituals used in the play, including how to light Hanukkah candles, how to pray, sit shivah and recite the Kaddish. And when he learned that actor Adam Godley’s (Mayer Lehman) father had died a few weeks before the play’s opening in London, Epstein said, “I got very emotional at that point. I almost broke down.” He explained that Godley saying Kaddish every night for his fictional Jewish father would be like saying the Kaddish for his own parent. And he predicted that many of the audience members would almost involuntarily say, ‘Amen.’ ”

Ben Power. Photo Credit Mark Douet

“The Lehman Trilogy” doesn’t directly address how the brothers profited from slavery as they built their business in Alabama in the mid-1800s. Power said that he and Mendes discussed the matter a great deal. “The Black Lives Matter movement made me think a lot more about how we were representing the full story of America in the early part of the play,” he said. “The job we had to get right was landing the reality of the cotton industry and the relationship between that and the Lehman brothers.”

Was Power concerned that the show might provoke stereotypes about Jews and money?

“We talked about it with the rabbi. The Lehmans were Jews and they ran a bank. There’s no getting away from that,” he said, “but I don’t think the show deals in tropes. I think that their Jewishness and their financial acumen are two separate issues. I’m confident that the play is responsible in terms of the story it tells.”

“The Lehman Trilogy” is playing at the Ahmanson Theatre through April 10. Click here for tickets and information.