Last week, the Tony Award-winning play The Lehman Trilogy opened in a TimeLine Theatre/Broadway in Chicago coproduction at Broadway Playhouse. The play is based on the novel Qualcosa sui Lehman by Stefano Massini, first published in Italy in 2016 and in an English translation by Richard Dixon in 2020.
If you’ve never read the book
you might be fine
with the play.
The Lehman Trilogy
that is
produced locally by TimeLine Theatre
for Broadway in Chicago
and selling tickets
like a hot stock
audiences flocking to it
as if it were another Fiddler.
Amen to that!
You might not catch
the whiff of something
nefarious there
something you wouldn’t expect
to make its way
unannounced
into the
Broadway Playhouse
at Water Tower Place
in 2023.
And why would you?
With three so talented
local actors
charming your socks off
as they morph into
the three original Lehman brothers,
their wives, their children,
and everyone they meet—
a multitude!
It’s Whitmanesque.
Except for
the German accents
the Hebrew prayers
and the circumcision
which you will hear about
immediately,
in the very first lines.
The book that gave birth to this play
(word for word in almost every case)
has
“circumcised Jew”
as its second line.
It’s the calling card
dealt
Henry Lehman
oldest brother and first arrival
on these shores
in the 700-page blank verse poem
which
“dares to tell the story of modern capitalism”
(its book jacket says)
wedding
Jews to capitalism
with all its flaws
like this:
“Next to the Cotton Exchange
they have opened the Coffee Exchange.
Emanuel Lehman is part of it
as are the Goldmans
the Blumenthals
the Sachses
the Singers:
Baruch HaShem for King Coffee!”
And this:
The “enormous New York [Stock] Exchange” is
“a synagogue”;
a Lehman son succeeds
“thanks to the mitzvot of a banking Torah”;
his sons grow up to
“spell out the bank’s new Talmud”;
and when the business fails,
forty years after the last Lehman led it,
the original three brothers
(“an arm,” “a head,” and “a potato”)
sitting around a conference table
in some epilogue heaven
observe “Shiva and sheloshim”
and say
“Qaddish.”
Cartoon characters all.
Along the way, the Lehmans
(read Jews)
blamed
for everything from middlemen
and tobacco
to coal
credit
King Kong
and
nuclear weapons.
“Evil may well be bad . . . but it’s useful,” a lesson they teach.
The author, we’re told
learned his Yiddish
at Hebrew school
in Italy
an Italian
not a Hebrew
sent there
because he didn’t behave
which
might explain
a lot
if true
but doesn’t,
even with the Tony
in ’22,
make it better
if you’ve read the book.
“Can’t we sue
this schmuck
who stole
and distorted
our lives?”
is what
the “arm”
would actually
be asking
the “head”
at the table
the long glass table
in that epilogue boardroom.
But “The verdict has already been given”:
In America
—God bless it!—
the dead
can’t be libeled.
Not even when
the living
are also
defamed.