ACT’s “Lehman” Lacks Visceral Piece of Dark American Chapter
Anyone in the US who lost their entire life savings, their home, their business, or their job starting in September 2008 will remember with horror the most devastating financial meltdown of the 21st Century. September 15th marked the day when Lehman Brothers collapsed and declared bankruptcy. Dubbed “The Great Recession,” this crisis led to a severe economic recession, with millions of people losing their jobs and countless businesses going bankrupt through no fault of their own.
Between October 2008 and April 2009, an average of 700,000 American workers lost their jobs each month—contributing to the worst sustained decline in employment since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The effects on the overall economy, in the US and across the globe, were felt for years beyond 2008. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), “the long-term decline in labor force participation continued during this recovery, while long-term unemployment and involuntary part-time employment remained elevated.”
Robert Pescovitz, Bradford Farwell, and Brandon J. Simmons in The Lehman Trilogy. / Rosemary Dai Ross
The Lehman Trilogy, which opened April 26th at ACT Theatre, was written by Stefano Messini as a long-form poem. It was originally a 9-hour opus, and clearly the play has a lot of ground to cover (from September 11, 1844—when the first of the three immigrant brothers arrived in America from Germany—to September 15, 2008, when the collapse and bankruptcy ensued, almost 164 years to the day later). To create a more practical version for audiences, playwright Ben Power was charged in 2016 with adapting the show into what would become a three-plus hour production with only three actors performing dozens of characters.
While watching the play I became aware that the story seemed incomplete despite the three-and-a-half-hour running time. Due to the sprawling timeline on which the playwright and adaptor chose to focus, the pace of the play often felt rushed and short of detail, so that for an audience, there was not enough time to sit with certain characters, events, or incidents and get to know, understand, or connect with them before we were whisked away to the next plot point. With moments going by so quickly and being addressed without much nuance, it felt like the heart and the guts of the story were compromised, even sacrificed, to ensure that the entire pre-2008 Lehman’s story could be included.
ACT’s Artistic Director John Langs, who directed this show, wrote with detail in the program notes about his own experience on the day of the crash and his sensorial description of what occurred. Ironically the play does not address said day, or reveal what happened to the millions and millions of others just like Langs. The final moment of the show is the ringing of a telephone which represents the fatal phone call that would set the calamitous tumble of the world’s economy into motion.
Instead, the vast majority of the play leans heavily on the narrative of three Jewish brothers, immigrants from humble origins who found success through perseverance and resilience in the land of opportunity, as opposed to featuring three opportunists whose financial success built a legacy that ultimately rained down devastation on countless millions of people. Being Jewish myself, I found it cringeworthy to watch a play about Jewish characters whose greed and obsession with money might affirm the stereotypes and tropes that people with pre-existing biases harbor against Jews, no matter how much Messini and Langs tried to humanize the Lehmans. And I don’t know if the intentions were purposeful to downgrade (via omission) the fallout of the Great Recession in this play to try to mitigate the worst parts of the Lehman legacy, but all of these facets made the story feel incomplete nonetheless.
Farwell, Pescovitz, and Simmons in The Lehman Trilogy / Rosemary Dai Ross
The three actors (Bradford Farwell, Robert Pescovitz, and Brandon J. Simmons) played multiple characters, but they also switched inexplicably out of their characters to become narrators—passive-voiced observers— telling some parts of the story. The breakneck speed at which we were whizzed along through 164 years by the characters who sometimes disappeared and became narrators turned me into a passive observer outside of the play’s action, and, at times, made it difficult for me to follow the plot or to connect with the characters.
Langs calls this play a cautionary tale, but what are we being cautioned against? What happened during the seismically devastating Great Recession? Langs indicates that excessive greed and avarice are dangerous and, left unchecked, will lead to calamity, causing real harm to real people. But because we as the audience don’t see how the repercussions unfolded, we are effectively shielded from confronting the horrific details of history, which could mute our understanding of why we as a society should not allow these events to happen again.
Langs adds in his notes: “It is stories like this that will help us forge a more responsible lens for the future”. But is a responsible lens being forged if the most grisly and infamous details of a true story are purposefully left out of a play? Is it responsible storytelling to end an alleged cautionary tale at the exact point when the most cataclysmic events of the timeline are about to begin? Is it responsible storytelling to confidently assume that everyone in the audience already knows the dire scope of the fallout from this dark chapter of our history only a generation ago, and so, the playwright feels it is not necessary to address that fallout?
Job seekers in line in New York, 2009. / Federal Reserve History via Getty
Alphecca Muttardy, a Macro Economist with the Coalition for a National Infrastructure Bank, released a stark warning recently, bringing into question what we have learned, if anything, from the Lehman Brothers’ legacy and how seriously we take the task of making sure history isn’t repeated:
“Federal Reserve’s inflation control policy has meant that banks are generally losing money because they must pay 5+% interest on deposits and money markets, while they are locked into long-term loans that earn only half as much in fixed interest (i.e., banks net interest earnings are negative). To offset those losses, the Fed has allowed banks to park any excess cash they have at the Fed, earning 5+% interest. Now the Fed is losing money, because it pays 5+% interest on those bank deposits, while it earns only half as much on the long-term Treasuries it holds. To date, the Fed has accumulated $156 billion in real financial losses, and is unable to pay its normal annual dividend to the Federal budget. Taxpayers are now forced to make up the difference. Add to that, banks have consolidated into just four too-big-to-fail institutions that control 39 percent of all bank assets. And new Fed studies and data revealed that banks hold $21 trillion in "runnable" liabilities (cash that could leave banks quickly), $5 trillion in wobbly commercial real estate loans (CRE), and trillions in derivatives tied to CRE, interest rates, or the frothy stock market. Describing these dangerous developments, George Washington University Law Professor Art Wilmarth once again called for restoration of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that Bill Clinton repealed, [which] led to the 2008 financial meltdown just 10 years later.” (Muttardy, Alphecca. Newsletter: “Economy and Infrastructure Roundup,” April 2024.)
