From left, Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley in “The Lehman Trilogy” on Broadway.
The superb British actors Simon Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley narrate and embody generations of Lehman men in a tale of immigrant aspiration, American ingenuity and the outstretching of dynastic arms — until they overreach. An overconfidence fueled by a faith in capitalism everlasting eventually undoes the dynasty.
What Massini lays out, in a work first produced in Paris in 2013 and eventually in Power’s version, for London’s National Theatre last year, is not so much a “too big to fail”-style cautionary tale of fiscal irresponsibility. “The Lehman Trilogy” has a larger canvas in mind. It’s a work in love with the first ripples of great historical tides, with a most theatrical kind of scholarship: the tracing of massive cultural upheavals to some of their singular roots.
It is a taint that never entirely wears off, as you watch the company expand into financial services on Wall Street, pouring money into industries that will make it richer and into newfangled tools to knit itself ever more fundamentally into the national fabric.