The Lehman Trilogy – Broadway Playhouse – October 12, 2023

I know The Lehman Trilogy won the Tony award for best play but I have a lot of problems with it. And I’m not the only one.

The Washington Post suggested that “an American playwright [the playwright was Italian], confronted on a daily basis with the economic, cultural and historical ramifications of slavery,” would not have made the same decision to remain silent on the issue.

We’ve all become somewhat inured to the cavalier insertion of historical inaccuracies for the sake of artistic license, though I, for one, believe such liberties often make the vehicle less, not more engaging. So I won’t go into great detail regarding the ironic changes in the timeline  of events in a play produced by the TimeLine Theatre Company, as admitted in the play book itself, but can’t help but object to the reiteration of the myth that there were numerous suicides on Wall Street on Black Thursday in 1929. It’s just not true.

At least the acting was good, and I didn’t have to sit though the original five hours of the play, only three, which could have been reduced even further but for the author’s or adapter’s insistence on repeatedly using repetition until that poor horse died from a concussion.