Lehman Brothers

Went to a play last night. The Lehman Trilogy, at Theatrical Outfit, tells the true story about the rise and fall of the financial company. 

It’s a beautifully written play and the Atlanta production is terrific. You should see it. Wednesdays are pay-what-you-can.

It’s got me completely mixed up, though, when it comes to figuring out what kind of story this is. It is, on its face, an immigrant story. Three brothers migrate from Germany to Montgomery, AL, where they open a clothing shop. Relationships with plantation employees and owners shift the brothers into being cotton brokers. From there, they open a storefront in New York, expand to other commodities, and eventually turn their business into a bank, and finally, a “financial services” corporation. 

The morality tale is so confusing. The brothers are sympathetic—Jews in the Antebellum South, they made themselves something out of nothing. But the play makes very little of their complicity with slaveholding. The brothers’ religiosity, which is featured prominently in the play, seems entirely focused on personal character, family bonds, and in-group solidarity, has no bearing on their relation to structural sin. The way Judaism is depicted in the story made one person near me wonder if the play was anti-Semitic.

The play is also confusing when it comes to its treatment of capitalism. Is it good when it’s in the hands of faithful, devout brothers, but bad when it’s in the hands free-range, secular outsiders? Is it good when it’s inhabited by virtuous actors but infinitely corruptible in the hands of the unvirtuous?  Is it good when it’s small and local but bad when it’s national or international and removed from face-to-face or blood ties? Is it good when it’s tied to the buying and selling of actual commodities but bad when it’s abstracted to money making money? All of these criticisms are legitimate, but none is clearly identified in the play.

The play ends up being a tragedy—the family disintegrates, the faith disappears, the pursuit of wealth swallows the whole. But no one inside the system is ever to blame. It’s a tragedy with no villains, no one to hold responsible for their failure to see the end that was coming. Is that what capitalism is? Is that where we’re all heading? A tragic end that no one saw coming and no one is to blame? That’s hardly a true story.