What could be more timely than an epic, award-winning (Five Tons) American drama about money problems?

First of all, no one will confuse the Lehman boys with Arthur Miller’s hero, Willy Loman. Death of a Salesman1949 Pulitzer Prize-winning American drama about money problems.

In the second, Willy was a victim of American business culture; He was someone who built his fragile dream on a reality that didn’t actually exist.

In the case of Lehman TrilogyOpening last week at Theater Calgary, American business culture is both the hero and villain of a three-hour drama in which almost everything goes right for the Lehmans; until, a century and a half after their arrival at Ellis, things went wrong. Island in New York as Jewish immigrants from Bavaria.

It’s like I just attended the world’s longest TED Talk! And instead of sending the audience at the Max Bell Theater off into the night with an inspiring revival, the multibillion-dollar enterprise that the brilliant Bavarian immigrant Lehmans built over more than a century and a half is ultimately fading away. 2008 economic crash.

What’s also shocking is that, over the course of a three-hour TED Talk, Lehman Trilogy It is also thoughtful, entertaining and lively.

The story within the story Lehman Trilogy The one and a half century old epic is performed by three actors who do everything except serve drinks to the audience.

Michael Rubenfeld, Alex Poch-Goldin, Diane Flacks in Lehman Trilogy at Theater Calgary until November 3. Photo: Trudie Lee

Patriarch Henry Lehman (Michael Rubenfeld), a fabric dealer, is the story’s origin story, whom we meet in a modest shop in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1850s, where he opens a small shop with a single sign advertising fine fabrics and suits.

But Henry soon realizes that he must expand the line to meet the needs of the local people, many of whom own cotton plantations, and soon Henry, with the help of his brothers Emmanuel (Alex Poch-Goldin) and Mayer (Diane Flacks), also supplies seeds, tools, He also sells boots and straw hats.

And soon thereafter, like Ticketmaster and Taylor Swift, the Lehmans discover there are riches to be made serving as third-party brokers for Alabama cotton and mill owners in the northeastern U.S. who crave it for their booming apparel industry. .

“We are middlemen,” Emmanuel explains on a trip to New York, where he discovers two things: You can’t have too much Alabama cotton in your back pocket, and New York City is the epicenter of American business and the Lehmans should be there, too. .

Soon Emmanuel, a ruthless type, has a wife (Pauline) who he must propose 19 times before she says yes, and an office in lower Manhattan. “Stock Exchange” where all kinds of goods can be bought and sold.

But just as Emmanuel is about to start to relax, considering that his job as a cotton broker has made him, in his own words, “one of the richest bachelors in New York,” the Civil War breaks out, destroying a business model based on slavery.

“You had to know it was going to end this way,” says one plantation owner in Alabama when Mayer was driving around after the war to supply cotton for the business. “This whole enterprise was built on a crime.”

But Lehmans are nothing if not agile. They are switching from cotton to coffee trade. They’re moving from coffee to railways to the internet in the late ’19s^he century.

When a Lehman dies, a son is born and enters the family business and pushes it into new corners of American enterprise, be it oil, art, horses or entertainment, until the Lehmans realize that they are, in fact, a bank in reality. for investors.

It all unfolds in a script by Stefano Massini, adapted from Ben Power’s original Italian; sometimes it feels more like a script reading by a heroic trio of actors who I hope get paid per word – it’s almost entirely narrated. !

It’s an unusual way to share a three-hour stage story; The only comparable thing I can think of is this: Laramie Project, or any other verbatim theater production. seedsbut it worked for me.

The set, by Amy Keith, is minimalist and stark, populated with projected images (by Haui) that are particularly effective when portraying Gilded Age Manhattan. Director Sarah Garton-Stanley does an excellent job of finding a way to tell a big, somewhat impersonal story about finance and big business (!!) in a way that feels personal and connects us all to the growing fortunes of one family’s very large corporation. .

Rubenfeld is wonderful as the patriarch Henry, followed by a collection of various Lehmans, from little kids to girlfriends. There’s a looseness and humanity that draws you into a story that sometimes seems to pull you away from the American dreamscape overtime.

Michael Rubenfeld, Diane Flacks in the Lehman Trilogy at the Calgary Theatre. Photo: Trudie Lee)

Like Emmanuel and many others, Poch-Goldin is the catalyst for the family’s relentless quest to reach America. The fact that Emmanuel has aged into his 70s and can’t stop coming to work and trying to make smart investments long after the family bank has grown to a size where a whole apparatus has come into play clearly shows that this has reached somewhat dysfunctional levels. I paid a lot of money to make these.

Flacks brings a much different energy to her other two roles, especially since she often plays male roles; but in a game that focuses on a specific kind of American culture, that’s comforting in a way. The dream is told through men’s eyes and men’s dreams.

(I feel just like that HBO smash InheritanceThere’s a whole host of other stories and voices we don’t know from beginning to end Lehman TrilogySo, starting with the slaves who picked all that cotton for free, the people whose American Dreams didn’t come true while they helped the Lehmans live theirs, I guess that’s another game.)

final stages Lehman Trilogy The two most traumatic moments in American business history, Monday 1929 – October 28! – when the stock market crashed and then eighty years later, in 2008, when a new financial crisis completely collapsed Lehman Brothers.

The first big crash is staged devastatingly, with each suicide of a Lehman being narrated by a broker who can’t understand what’s going on, and all of this activates the conceit that the Lehman family understands about the economic crisis: some banks must go bankrupt early. , to allow it to protect the stronger banks, and luckily for them, they are one of the larger, stronger banks.

The shock, eighty years later, is to discover that Lehman Brothers, which has been plunged into debt by a new group of owners led by a predatory trader (the family had already sold the firm), is the government. will let it fail.

unfortunately the end Lehman Trilogy The company has been sold and the outcome continues as if Travis and Tay-Tay have left the party and all that’s left is a room full of Swifties and Ticketmaster employees.

After more than a century with the Lehmans, when their multibillion-dollar private banking company finally disappeared, they were nowhere to be found, leaving you wondering exactly who to feel sorry for.

Lehman Trilogy At Theater Calgary until November 3. For tickets and information visit: Here.