Shortly after the spectacular collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the global recession that came tumbling after it, an Italian playwright named Stefano Massini began working on a fictionalized account of the men who’d founded the eponymous firm a century and a half earlier. I Capitoli del Crollo, or Chapters of the Fall, saw its first productions in 2010 on Italian stages, followed by performances on national radio. And then the play took off in various translations across Europe, drawing acclaim throughout the 2010s in France, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere. Despite its title, the play is mostly about the rise of Lehman Brothers; it follows three generations of Lehman men to tell a giddy tale about the growth of their bank and, by extension, rapacious American capitalism. In 2016, Massini published a 760-page expanded version, Qualcosa sui Lehman (Something About the Lehmans), which was billed as a novel and, like the playscript, was written in a sort of Homeric free verse befitting the epic ambitions of the project.
No doubt, part of the appeal of Massini’s work for directors was the open-ended nature of the play. Written in the third person, with no lines assigned to particular characters, it left theater artists free to shape their productions as they wished, even as they hewed to Massini’s script. Some European stagings used seven actors to play the Lehman men across the 164-year saga, as well as the dozens of other people they encountered; others used four or as many as 12.
The English adaptation by Ben Power—now called The Lehman Trilogy—uses three actors. Under the direction of Sam Mendes, it was a smash hit at London’s National Theater in 2018 and then in the West End. When it moved to the Park Avenue Armory in New York City the following year, tickets drew as much as $2,000 on the resale market—an almost too on-the-nose replication of the Lehmans’ own gleeful discovery in the play of the profitable manipulations of supply and demand.
The show was slated to move to Broadway in the spring of 2020. With the reopening of Broadway theaters after an 18-month shutdown, The Lehman Trilogy finally began performances this past October at the Nederlander, where it ran until January 2; it will begin a series of performances at the Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles in March. Meanwhile, an English translation of the novel (by Richard Dixon) came out last fall.