One trio skippable, the other unmissable
The Lehman Trilogy is, I am sorry to report, a 3-hour snooze. Some of this is on the piece itself. Italian playwright Stefano Massini with Ben Power (re)imagines the rise of the Lehman corporation from its relatively humble beginnings in the nineteenth century as a dry goods shop in the US South to the years before the bank met its 2008 market crash demise, and whether the attendant 700-page novel in verse came before or after the play, their kinship is obvious: both works are about the language, the talking, the retelling. Philip Akin’s Canadian production of this internationally acclaimed play which recently opened at the Canadian Stage is inert and visually dull - the three actors, playing all the roles, run up and down some brown boxes and rearrange them - and you could easily close your eyes and not miss much if you take this in as a radio drama. Earlier productions of the piece in other countries all have a strong visual side (video projections, changing sets, speed), and I understand why.
The play is almost exclusively focused on Lehmans the sons - there are no employees, helpers, competitors, colleagues in the speaking parts, almost no politicians or lawyers, and the only women who appear as characters are the odd love interest (played by the same three male principals, as are all the children). Once a woman is married and becomes a mother, she’s gone from the story, and the rising son takes over. I wouldn’t ordinarily object to that if the thing worked (see for example Peter Weir’s film Master and Commander which is perfect even though it contains zero female characters) but this is a century-long story of a family and one half of it is kept invisible.
More importantly, the effects of the Lehmans' choice of certain commodities (cotton in the ante-bellum south; ammunition; tobacco; subprime lending) are never made visible in any great detail, nor is the context to the company’s growth (slavery and civil war and market crashes and impoverishment). It’s all… referred to in passing in the conversations among brothers, and the conversation across generations in a forward motion of growth and expansion. As the actors playing the Lehmans in all productions so far tend to be charismatic and fun, this bizarro play I suppose puts us in a position of feeling for the capitalist and the speculator. It’s not really a rags-to-riches story either: it’s a modest-capital to riches story in which the last Lehman to be involved with the family business dies in 1969. The company changes before 2008, and that last bit is particularly rushed in the play, while the foray into subprime markets doesn’t even feature in the story. But why else are we watching?
Skip. Or look for a recording of another production if you must.
In better news, I think I just found a Toronto production that doesn’t torture you with its politics, doesn’t preach, doesn’t demand apologies, doesn’t demand you decolonize your ways, doesn’t school you about race, doesn’t suggest the world is divided into the oppressors and the oppressed and what are you gonna do about it huh? It’s only after I’ve sat through the first half of Morris Panych’s new play Withrow Park (directed by Jackie Maxwell), a play so middle class that the action never leaves the middle class living room facing Withrow Park and its three tilapia- and basmati-cooking, The Globe print edition reading 60+ WASPs, that I realized what I’ve been missing and how much. We are going through the period of Zhdanovschina in arts and culture, and have been for years now, and I am so tired of it that I’ll welcome anything, any old thing, that steps out of that paradigm.
It always helps if you throw a dash of Chekhoviana onto whatever your story involving a group of people in an old house is, and Panych does that too.
Three people, then, and a house facing Withrow Park. Two are a couple - played by Nancy Palk and Benedict Campbell - who have been trying to separate as the husband discovers late in life that he is very very gay. His elopement however did not work out as his pediatrician boyfriend ends up eloping on him in turn, and high-tailing it to Florida with another man. The play opens with a heartbroken Arthur and an irritated Janet trying to find their way out of the limbo of still living together (the house is co-owned after all). Janet’s sister Marion is also there (Corrine Koslo), presumably paying rent, presumably never married, relentlessly cynical and wisecracking. If this sounds like a set-up for a mediocre sit-com, you’re rushing to judgement. It gets better, darker, more complicated. More… Chekhovian.
One day a young man in a wrinkled suit (Jonathan Sousa) knocks at the door to introduce himself since he is “new to the neighbourhood”. The trio, each person for their own reasons, are in dire need of distraction, and Janet finds herself chatty and welcoming without ever bothering to ask which house in the neighbourhood the man moved into. In the next few days they develop something of a rapport and the Withrow trio invites him over for dinner.
The night of the dinner, the play splits into two planes of existence, and I shouldn’t say much more. The man comes and certain things happen; or the man does not come and would never have been invited in the first place (Torontonians don’t invite their own friends to dinner, let alone shabbily dressed people they’ve only met a couple of times in a local park). There was a moment early on in the second act where I thought, oh no, here comes the preaching. The outsider is given a monologue which touches on the topic of consumerism and possessions not making one happy, but this was brief and it quickly veered to another, wackier direction, to my great relief.
If Jean-Philippe Toussaint is right, if there are roughly two ways of grappling with one’s life – to use his terms, the struggle of living and the despair of being – this play is firmly planted on the despair of being side. The struggle of living can certainly mean the struggle of making ends meet, the precarity, but it is also all the items thrown your way to make you miserable, the concrete events like breakup, firing, bereavement, estrangement, failure, any specific number of things that make us miserable. The despair of being is when you find yourself relatively calm and peaceful, and turn to the meaning of it all. Why am I here, in this house next to a park, in this city, being this many years old, having this peaceful, comfortable life with these two? Is nothing else ever going to happen? Is this it?1
(Sometimes we step in and out of these two modes as we live, but sometimes they are starkly separated into two subsequent life periods.)
Each of the characters gradually reaches that point, as we learn about their mutual entanglements. Janet learns of a deteriorating eyesight problem and wonders if she should sell up and use the opportunity to travel a little before she becomes disabled. Arthur’s love interest reappears, but he is not sure what to do with that fact and has second thoughts on the whole gayness business. (Marion tells him that the value of self-expression should not trump the value of a stable family life that he’s had with Janet, no matter how controlling she is, and it’s a joke that gets a laugh but also maybe it’s not, not entirely.) Marion too is at a crossroads.
Looming over all this: the property facing the park, the decades of accumulated history in it, the home. Now, this is not a sharp play; the house-less in it are not the house-less we’ve gotten to know over the last three years who are living in tents in parks and on other green surfaces in the city. The word “drugs” is not of import. Nobody ever makes an observation that Janet and Arthur are, effectively, millionaires, as is any Torontonian owning a house in such a prime location. There is no cost of living crisis and no housing crisis in this play, or if there is, it’s never on the conversational radar for the three protagonists. Those words are never uttered, because their radars are busy with other sorts of pressing questions. And that is perfectly fine. It’s a gentle play which lets you find the edges on your own if you are so inclined. And I am grateful for that.
Until December 10 at the Tarragon Theatre
“I was alone in the semi-darkness of the booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moment when thought can let itself naturally follow its course, are precisely moments when, having temporarily given up fighting a seemingly inexhaustible reality, the tension begins to loosen little by little, all the tension accumulated in protecting yourself against the threat of injury—and I had my share of minor injuries—and that, alone in an enclosed space, alone and following the course of your thoughts in a state of growing relief, you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.” As told by the narrator of Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, (1989, Les Editions des Minuits), translated to English by Matthew B. Smith (2008, Dalkey Archives Press).