It all begins unassumingly with a purchase and sale of cotton.
That is how three immigrant brothers — German Jews Henry. Emanuel and Mayer Lehman — arrive in the United States penniless in the 1840s and build a renowned investment empire.
Collectively known as Lehman Brothers, their business model evolved from commodities trading to pure finance, money making more money. They were the personification of the American Dream until, in 2008, their corporate bubble burst and their fortune and company disintegrated.
That rags to riches and back again journey is told in a remarkable epic play, The Lehman Trilogy, an acclaimed work in London and later New York, now spreading to adventurous regional theaters like Coral Gables’ GableStage, where an imaginative, involving production continues through April 21.
The trio of one-hour plays spans 164 years of Lehman and American history, intertwining the rising and falling fate of generations of this increasingly assimilated family with major signposts of the nation — the Civil War, the 1929 stock market crash, World War II and, ultimately, the economic implosion of this current century.
What makes The Lehman Trilogy so theatrical and theatrically effective is the way that Italian playwright Stefano Massini and translator/adaptor Ben Power tell this sweeping saga with just three actors. James Zannelli, Brandon Morris and Mark H. Dold — all imports from New York — collectively play scores of characters ranging from Lehman descendants, wives, offspring, customers and executives, changing personas with a slight costume piece change, new stances, voices, ages and genders as needed.
Producing artistic director Bari Newport stages the towering, three-plus-hour work with fluidity and clarity, aided by a remarkable visual design of animated, hand-drawn projections by Jamie Godwin that sketch in the evolving world around the performers on a blackboard-like set by Frank Oliva, The staging and visuals work in tandem to propel the narrative forward, prompted by third-person narration shared by the three nimble performers.
Chances are you already know where the history of the Lehmans ends, but not how it got there. Following an opening non-verbal preface of janitorial clean-up in the Lehman Brothers’ offices in 2008, the play dials back to 1844, when eldest brother Heyum Lehman (Zannelli) — newly dubbed Henry by a well-meaning immigration officer — arrives in America eager to embrace the opportunity this new land affords. Before his brothers can join him, he relocates to — of all places — Montgomery, Alabama, where he quickly seizes on the profit potential in the local crop of cotton.
But Alabama has its limitations — not to mention not much of a Jewish community — so the Lehmans soon return to the bustling city of New York, where they marry, raise families and extend their wealth. Over time, as the play accelerates toward the present day, the Lehmans careen towards contemporary technology, which will ultimately spell their undoing.
Similar to the way that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America stretched the resources and talents of theater companies in the 1990s, Stefano Massini’s Lehman Trilogy will be a measure of a troupe’s risk-taking and abilities in the years ahead. (The Maltz Jupiter Theatre has already announced plans to produce the work in the coming season.) But for the moment, it is GableStage and Newport that demonstrate a command of such an ultimate challenge.
THE LEHMAN TRILOGY, GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. Through Sunday, April 21. $55-$75. Call 305-445-1119 or visit gablestage.org.