US Regional Premiere of THE LEHMAN TRILOGY to Close Out The Huntington's 2022-23 Season

The Huntington will end its 22/23 season with the 2022 Tony Award-winning Best Play The Lehman Trilogy, playing at The Huntington Theatre June 13 - July 16, 2023. A critically acclaimed international sensation, The Huntington's production will be the first created by an American theatre company and a major event.

Written by Stefano Massini and adapted into English by Ben Power, The Lehman Trilogy is an epic and timely story of family, ambition, and risk, sprawling across 163 years of history and shining a calculating spotlight on the spectacular rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers, a family and a company that changed the world. Carey Perloff (Rock 'n' Roll and Mary Stuart at The Huntington, A Thousand Splendid Suns and many others at San Francisco's ACT) will direct.

Performed entirely by three actors, the story follows the original three Lehman brothers, then their sons and grandsons, as they journey from rags to riches to ruin. In 1840s Alabama, a Bavarian immigrant dreams of a better life for his family. By the early 2000s, his descendants trigger unprecedented financial disaster. In a marvel of storytelling, this extraordinary piece of theatre is both an intimate saga about a family and a monumental exposé of unbridled capitalism.

"Experiencing The Lehman Trilogy was a theatrical revelation," says Huntington Artistic Director Loretta Greco. "Its epic exploration of capitalism and the American Dream, told through the lens of one particular family over generations, has the messy moral complexity, hubris, and dramatic ferocity of contemporary Greek tragedy."

"As performed simply by three actors inhabiting characters across age and gender," Greco continues, "it is both a staggering, highly entertaining work of the imagination and an uncomfortable and deeply complicated slice of our American history. Like all great works of art, the piece asks seismic questions of us - and we look forward to wrestling with them together, as we work to dream our community and culture forward."

"We are delighted to welcome Carey Perloff back to The Huntington," states Greco. "Her sublime work with actors and her immense talent for conjuring gorgeous epic stories for the stage makes her the perfect director to take on this remarkable reimagining."

The Lehman Trilogy has been translated into 24 languages and has received international acclaim from both critics and audiences: The New York Times praised The Lehman Trilogy as "genuinely epic. You're left reeling by the scope and vitality of it." The Hollywood Reporter called it "most thrilling...breathtaking!" Deadline called it, "A masterpiece. A miracle and a spellbinding demonstration of theatre's possibilities." And London's The Guardian called it, "astonishing. An intimate epic about the shifting definition of the American Dream."

Though highly praised around the world, The Lehman Trilogy has been criticized for underplaying the brothers' de facto ownership of enslaved Black Americans, and its non-representation of the African American experience. As the first American theatre company to produce The Lehman Trilogy, The Huntington is committed to engaging in robust conversations about the historical erasures within this work of fiction, the complicated issues the play addresses, and perhaps most importantly, how we as a country, move forward. More information about a series of stimulating events and discussions around the play will be announced closer to the production.

This Tony Award-winning play first premiered in France in 2013 and in Italy in 2015, before the English adaptation debuted at London's National Theatre in 2018, then played the Park Avenue Armory in NYC in spring of 2019. After pandemic delays, The National Theatre production had a limited run on Broadway (Sept 2021 - Jan 2022) and in Los Angeles (Mar - Apr 2022). Stefano Massini also adapted the play into a novel which was translated into English by Richard Dixon and published in 2020.

The Lehman Trilogy replaces Bhangin' It: A Bangin' New Musical in The Huntington season. Bhangin' It was originally scheduled for December 2022 then postponed to summer 2023 due to a manufacturing delay in connection with The Huntington Theatre renovation and its new automated rigging system, but rescheduling all of the elements involved proved impossible. "We are extremely disappointed that no matter how we tried, we could not make the calendar work for the larger good of this exceptional new musical," says Greco. An announcement from the Bhangin' It team regarding their next steps will be forthcoming.

Huntington season ticket holders will have the opportunity to select The Lehman Trilogy as part of their 22/23 season ticket packages. Additional ticket information and a casting announcement will be made available at a later date.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Stefano Massini

(Playwright) is the first Italian author to be awarded with a Tony Award. He is an internationally renowned novelist and playwright who regularly contributes to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. For several years he has served as artistic consultant at Piccolo Teatro di Milano - Teatro d'Europa. His works, including The Lehman Trilogy, have been translated into 27 languages, and his plays have been performed in more theatres around the world than those of any other living Italian writer, produced as far afield as Iran and Korea, and staged by directors such as Luca Ronconi and Sam Mendes. His most acclaimed works include: Intractable Woman, a decades-long international success; Ladies Football Club, which premiered to wide acclaim in Spain; and 7 Minutes, hailed by LeMonde as a "masterpiece" at the Comédie Française. He has won numerous Italian and foreign awards, including the Premio Vittorio Tondelli, the Premio Ubu, the Tony Award, the Drama Guild Award, and the Outer Critics Circle Award. Qualcosa sui Lehman (The Lehman Trilogy) was among the most acclaimed novels published in Italy in recent years and won the Selezione Campiello Prize, the Super Mondello Prize, the De Sica Prize, the Prix Médicis Essai, and the Prix Meilleur Livre Étranger. He is currently creating a new multi-part play about the history of the atomic bomb, entitled Manhattan Project.

Ben Power

(Adapter) is a Tony Award-winning writer for theatre, television, and film. Since 2010, he has worked at The National Theatre, including six years as deputy artistic director, and two years programming The Shed. In addition to his internationally successful adaptation of The Lehman Trilogy, his adaptations for the National include DH Lawrence's Husbands & Sons, Euripides' Medea, and Ibsen's Emperor & Galilean. He has worked as dramaturg and writer for companies such as the RSC, Complicite, and Headlong, where he was associate director and created adaptations of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. Work on screen includes his BAFTA longlisted adaptation of Robert Harris' Munich: Edge of War for Netflix and the BAFTA winning BBC Shakespeare adaptation The Hollow Crown.

Carey Perloff

(Director) was artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater from 1992 - 2018 and of the Classic Stage Company from 1986 - 1992. She directed Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll and Schiller's Mary Stuart at The Huntington. At ACT she staged over 100 productions of classical and contemporary plays, including 11 by Tom Stoppard (2 American premieres) and 6 by Harold Pinter (2 American premieres). Perloff has directed at theatres across America including Seattle Rep, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe, the Roundabout, and Arena Stage, and across Canada at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, The Arts Club Vancouver, Theatre Calgary, and the Shakespeare Company. As a playwright, Perloff's work has been widely produced. She is the author of Beautiful Chaos: A Life in the Theater (City Lights Books, 2015), awarded the One City One Book "Big Read" Award from the City of San Francisco and Pinter and Stoppard: A Director's View (Bloomsbury Methuen 2022). In 2021, Perloff received a director commission from Seattle Rep to create a new production of the Oedipus cycle with John Douglas Thompson, and recently launched a new digital platform called Tiny Theatricals to share open rehearsals of classical plays for Digital Theatre Plus in London. More information at careyperloff.com

ABOUT THE HUNTINGTON

Celebrating 40 years of outstanding theatre, The Huntington is Boston's theatrical commons and leading professional theatre company. On our stages and throughout our city, we share enduring and untold stories that spark the imagination of audiences and artists and amplify the wide range of voices in our community. Committed to welcoming broad and diverse audiences, The Huntington provides life-changing opportunities for students through its robust education and community programs, is a national leader in the development of playwrights and new plays, acts as the host organization for a multi-year residency of The Front Porch Arts Collective, a Black theatre company based in Boston, and serves the local arts community through our operation of The Huntington Calderwood/BCA. Under the leadership of Norma Jean Calderwood Artistic Director Loretta Greco and Managing Director Michael Maso, The Huntington recently reopened the historic Huntington Theatre this fall after its transformational renovation. A storied venue with a bold vision for the future, the project will allow us to innovatively expand our services to audiences, artists, and the community for generations to come. For more information, visit huntingtontheatre.org.

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