I review the Broadway transfer of The Lehman Trilogy in today’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Lehman Trilogy” tells how the three original Lehman brothers emigrated from Bavaria to Alabama in the mid-19th century and started a general store that traded with slave-holding plantation owners (a fact that is discreetly underlined in the play’s newly revised version) and evolved into a New York-based cotton brokerage. In due course, the firm grew into a financial empire, surviving two world wars and the depression and thriving—or, latterly, seeming to thrive—until it imploded in 2008, nearly forty years after the last member of the Lehman family departed….
The impression “The Lehman Trilogy” gives is of a novel being read out loud by three actors, much of which is written in the third person and the present tense (“Emanuel sits up in his armchair all night”). To be sure, Sam Mendes, the director, working in close collaboration with his inspired design team, has gone a long way toward giving “The Lehman Trilogy” a simulacrum of dramatic momentum, but it is not the kind to be found in a conventionally dialogue-driven play….
If I sound a bit lukewarm about the results, it is because I did not immediately warm to “The Lehman Trilogy.” But Sam Mendes’ staging is gloriously imaginative, and Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Adrian Lester, the three English character actors who comprise his cast, are prodigiously gifted changelings who all play men, women and children at various points in the show. Without exception, they do so with a light and witty touch that draws the sting from the words they speak, which are too often portentous and never truly poetic…
“Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote.”
E.B. White, One Man’s Meat (originally published in 1938)
I mentioned in this space the other day that “personal distractions” were among the things that had kept me from posting for three weeks. The main one is the fact that I have fallen in love.
The woman in question is Cheril Mulligan, a theater-and-film buff from and lifelong resident of Long Island. We became acquainted through Twitter, on which she tweets under a pseudonym, and “Three on the Aisle,” the theatrical podcast that I do with Peter Marks and Elisabeth Vincentelli. We got to know one another during the lockdown by exchanging direct messages on Twitter, and resolved to meet in person once we were both fully vaccinated. We both realized during her first visit to my apartment in upper Manhattan in June that we were in love, and we’ve had no reason to change our minds since then. Indeed, we now visit each other every weekend.
What’s she like? Smart, funny, kind, caring, and beautiful, for openers. (Yes, she looks like Liv Tyler.) In addition to appreciating good food, Cheril loves music—she’s deeply into Stephen Sondheim—and has a keen ear. Our tastes overlap, but not completely, in part because she’s a good deal younger than I am. As a result, we have the continuing pleasure of sharing all sorts of new things with one another. It was thanks to Cheril, for instance, that I first heard the music of John Hiatt and saw The Visitor, Paddington 2, and (no kidding) Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, while I in turn have had the privilege of showing her It Happened One Night and Rio Bravo and introducing her to Bill Evans and João Gilberto. I rejoice to report that she is now a full-fledged bossa nova fan.
My late wife Hilary, to whom I was wholly devoted, wanted me to find a new partner as soon as possible after she died, so much so that she brought up the subject more than once in her last months. “You’ll make a shitty singleton,” she warned me. I knew she was right, but I didn’t think it possible that I would get so lucky twice in a lifetime, especially in the midst of a pandemic, and four months later, I’m still stunned by my good fortune. Like the song says, I am once again “aware/Of being alive,” and it is my beloved Cheril who has made me so. Having her in my life is an unmixed blessing.
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Adam Driver sings Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive” (from Company) in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story:
Douglas Lyons’s “Chicken & Biscuits,” the third of an unprecedented eight shows by Black playwrights that are set to open on Broadway this season, bills itself as “a feel-good comedy that will feed your soul.” This production, which is extremely well directed by Zhailon Levingston, originated at a theater in Queens but was forced to close after less than two weeks because of the lockdown and is now being remounted with a mostly new cast at the much larger Circle in the Square Theatre. While the play is far from perfect, it delivers on its promise, and if you’re prepared to look past its flaws, you’ll find it to be both amusing and touching….
Nearly all of what I’d read about “Chicken & Biscuits” going in said that it tells the story of Baneatta and Beverly (Cleo King and Ebony Marshall-Oliver), two bickering sisters who are thrown together for their father’s funeral, at which it emerges that he had a third, illegitimate daughter, Brianna (NaTasha Yvette Williams). This makes the play sound like a farce, which it isn’t: Not only does Brianna make her entrance comparatively late, but it’s played straight. Moreover, the real emotional center of the play is to be found not in the reunion of the sisters but in the awkward relationship between Baneatta and Kenny (Devere Rogers), her youngest child, who is not only gay but has a Jewish partner (Michael Urie) to boot….
Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre plans to run two documentary plays—both of which are based on real-life occurrences and have already had well-received off-Broadway runs—in rotating repertory through mid-January. The first to open, Tina Satter’s “Is This a Room,” is a 65-minute staging by a four-person cast led by Emily Davis of the transcript of the FBI interrogation of Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor who was convicted in 2018 of leaking to the media a classified intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. (Its companion piece, Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.,” opens Sunday.) The transcript is performed verbatim, right down to the tiniest hems and haws.
I didn’t see the Vineyard Theatre’s original production, so I assume it’s possible that “Is This a Room” was more compelling in the company’s intimate 132-seat theater, but it doesn’t work at all in the 922-seat Lyceum, where there is no possibility of up-close intensity and the expressionistic special effects come across as absurdly exaggerated….
