About the show
The play The Lehman Trilogy is written in blank verse and narrative style. It is reminiscent of the long epic poems that were passed down through oral tradition by patterns of repetition and preserved in the memory of the storyteller by constant epithets. The adaptation for three actors heightens and exposes each of the three narrators not only as the bearer of the story, but also as the bearer of time and of several generations of characters, from the protagonists to mere episodic bystanders. The driving force behind the development of the financial system, based on the idea of perpetual growth, is presented through the compelling prism of a family saga, offering us several generations of Lehman family members as anchors and points of empathy. It is a distinctly "actor-driven" text and we have assembled a truly excellent and experienced cast for this performance at the Mini Teater.
In the preparations, we talked about the banks, the 2008 crisis, its causes and consequences. Although the play does not deal directly with this event and only appears in the epilogue, the banking issue is always in the minds of all of us - the audience and the team - like the sword of Damocles hanging over the name Lehman. Every beginning has an end, towards which we are relentlessly hurtling. The question that arises along the way is: what drives us? What is it that makes us want to have more and more, to go higher and higher, further and stronger? And when is the moment when what we have started is no longer our own and we are overwhelmed, overtaken and swallowed up?
The epic structure, the biblical references and the atmosphere of the story are also a reflection of a system built on trust, on nothing... "Money is spirit. / Money is numbers. / Money is air", says one of the characters in the play, who is a stockbroker. If money is the basic commodity with which the bank operates, then everything is actually built on nothingness, which is worked, tossed, divided, counted, transformed, zeroes and zeros are added, and made into an even greater nothingness - like blank paper, a tabula rasa, given value by language, purpose and words. Words have the power to (fore)tell a story or even the future.
Peter Petkovšek
Italian playwright Stefano Massini (b. 1975) wrote The Lehman Trilogy (2010) relatively quickly: two years after the global financial debacle triggered by the collapse of the "too big to fail" corporation in September 2008. In the months and years that followed, the name of Lehman Brothers represented the greed of those in charge, the massive evictions, and the severely shaken foundations of the global economy, which in the years that followed affected (also) our own economy and those of our neighbours'.
The text, which was initially staged with a large cast, debuted in France in 2013 (d. Arnaud Menier) and premiered two years later at Milan's Piccolo Theatre. This was the last directorial debut of Massini's former mentor, the renowned director Luca Ronconi. Ironically, it was Ronconi's death, in February 2015, that indirectly launched the text onto the Anglophone stage. At that time, the English film and theatre director Sam Mendes, in an obituary of his Italian colleague, read that a text on a subject that had interested him for a long time actually exists.
But Mendes did not imagine that Massini would approach Lehmann in a balladic way, focusing on the collapse of traditions and old identities, in a kind of hypnotic contemplation of the times and human instincts. In a two-year process, moving to the stage of London's National Theatre, he and playwright Ben Power shortened the text and adapted it for three actors. From there, it travelled to New York, where it won five Tony Awards in 2022, including for Best Director and Best Play. In the meantime, perhaps further motivated by his international success, Massini has published an even more unbound text in the form of a nine-hundred page book in 2020.
The Lehman Trilogy is the saga of an immigrant family, following the Lehman brothers and their descendants through the ups and downs of the family business, through the new names their company keeps adopting. It is a frenetic lullaby about a century and a half of American social and economic history, about the search for great opportunities in great crises. The Lehmans are driven by a drive for growth (of the family business, influence and capital) which at some point spirals out of control.
The story of Lehman Brothers begins when Heyum (Henry) Lehman emigrates to New York in 1844 from the small town of Rimpar in Bavaria, equipped with tradition, Talmudic principles of work and dedication. He is soon joined by his two younger brothers and together they set off in pursuit of the American dream. A small store in Alabama eventually grows into the fourth largest investment bank in New York, and old values, firmly rooted in the Ashkenazi tradition, give way to the pursuit of money. The family retreats from the shell of the corporation: in the end, there is no longer anyone with that surname in the company, and Lehman is just a magic word on the facade of a Wall Street skyscraper. A word that, years ago, may have breathed life into a mechanism (or being) that, according to Jewish tradition, rises up to help its creators - or destroys everything?
The text reveals Massini's personal connection to Judaism (as a child he was educated in traditional Jewish schools) and his frequent fascination with themes from semi-past and recent history.
Urban Zorko
About the director
Peter Petkovšek (b. 1986) graduated in Comparative Literature and French at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He continued his studies in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (MA Text and Performance) and in New York at Columbia University, where he completed his MA in Theatre Directing under the mentorship of renowned directors Anne Bogart and Brian Kulick. In America, he has directed: The Blind (Schapiro Theater), The Weird Tree (Lerner Studio), Scrapland (The Wintercheck Factory), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Fordham), The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Clark), Gilgamesh: A Musical Epic (The Connelly Theatre), From (Schapiro Theater), The Cherry Orchard (Horace Mann Theater), and Eden: Part III (Signature Theater). He has also directed internationally: in Ecuador and Chile with the Shuar and Mapuche Indian communities, in Hong Kong the musical Beauty and the Beast, which won the Trinity College Prize, in Amsterdam the international play I Am Not Antigone (by Vivien von Abendorff), and in Seoul he is developing Nick of Time, a play about climate change, with the Yesigong production company. After assisting director Mateja Koležnik with the opera Fidelio in Baden-Baden, he made his Slovene debut at the SLG Celje with the performance Klinc, and recently made his debut at the Slovene National Theatre Drama with the performance Mrs Dalloway. He is currently working on his PhD at the University of Leeds in England on performative reactions to climate change and intercultural dialogue as a generator of new social paradigms.
