THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
I’m very appreciative of the fact that you guys have agreed to chat with The American and tell us all about your involvement in The Lehman Trilogy it. Can we start by taking turns talking a bit about yourselves and how you came to be involved in the play?
Howard: I saw the show when it first came to New York, before it went to Broadway. They performed at the Armory in New York, which is a massive stage. Sam [Mendes, the director of American Beauty and of The Lehman Trilogy] described it more as an installation. It blew me away in the first 15 minutes, just the character Henry Lehman speaking to the audience. I saw Simon Russell Beale do it and it was the best 15 minutes of theater I've ever seen in my life. When you strip away everything else, it's storytelling at its finest, most pure level. There's a lot of power in that, when you're not trying to force something, you're not imposing your will on it, you're just honoring it – this is where theater should be.
After COVID it came back to Broadway, and Ben Miles was unable to do the role of Emanuel so they recast it with Adrian Lester. I became Adrian's understudy in New York. They won many awards and did well at the Tonys, then I had the great privilege of taking over the role and actually performing with Simon and Adam Godley in Los Angeles for about seven weeks. It was incredible. With the new production, Aaron has been involved the longest. I had three days of rehearsal with the guys, two days of tech. I knew the show, and if you honor the piece and tell the story it sort of takes care of you. I was motivated by nothing but pure fear for the first three weeks, but after a while I eased into it.What about you, John?
John: I went to university in Bristol and studied English and Drama there, did a three year degree and decided I wanted to do a two year postgraduate course at a place called Webber Douglas which doesn’t exist anymore, and I've been mainly in the theater since then. I've been doing a fair bit of screen work of late but did a couple of years at the RSC and this came out of the blue. One of the actors [Adrian Schiller] very sadly and unexpectedly died after the run in Australia and I got a call, fairly last minute, asking if I would like to step in. It was a bit of a scramble, they very kindly flew me to London for a couple of weeks rehearsal with Howard and Aaron and then it was straight out to San Francisco. It was in at the deep end.
Howard: By the way, flying to London, putting me up in a flat and giving me money for proper damn food. Oh my gosh, yeah. It made it bearable but it was a struggle.
John: Careful Howard, you don't know how that's going to look in print! [laughs]
People say Americans don't do irony… I think that's wrong!
Howard: One of the great things about doing these pieces is the chemistry that you have with the other actors. It's really important and we have wonderful chemistry; the three of us are having a lot of fun.
Aaron, as mentioned, you have the longest involvement with the play. What’s your personal draw to the story?
Aaron: I had done five other shows with Sam and I’d worked with Simon Russell Beale. Simon was in town and he told me they were doing Sam's masterpiece and it's his favorite thing. He tried to describe it, but if you've seen it, you know that it's hard to briefly describe. My wife and I went to visit her father in London 2019 and Sam got us tickets to it. Of course, we were blown away. When I heard it was coming to New York, I called him and said hey, I'd love to cover it. I had an audition and I got hired in the fall of 2019. They flew us, the three understudies, to London for a brief week, we flew home on February 28, we did four previews and of course, then the plague hit. Going forward, Howard and I started doing it together in 2021. I was just blown away by the theater craft. Obviously there were three brilliant actors there, Ben and Adam and Simon, the original trio. To me, it's everything that's the best about theater, all those things you can't do on film. There we were in the room in 2008. And yet there we were with three young Germans on the coast of New York in the 1800s. And down in Montgomery in the 1940s!
Why do you think a British film director is so good at American stories?
Howard: Oh, that's a good question. I think that in general it’s good storytelling. There's always a question if someone is telling you a story, and maybe they don't belong to that group, are they justified in being able to do that? There might be some truth to that, but also by not being an American, he has no personal stake. Maybe it's easier to look at a situation or a story more objectively when you're not in it. Sam does do that, you're right. It's his movies too, like Revolutionary Road and Road to Perdition.
John: I remember his early days when he was running the Donmar Warehouse in the ‘90s, his programming skewed massively towards the American repertoire, rediscovering lots of Sondheim musicals. It's always been something which he's clearly interested in – and does extremely well.
Aaron: It reminds me of the Shakespeare quandary – everyone does it, everywhere, and plenty of people who don't have roots in England are doing it. There's a debate about who does it better, and that's obviously irrelevant. As Howard says, good storytelling is just good storytelling. There's something universal in the great stories, so that would argue that anyone who's passionate about it can attack it and maybe even interrogate it – is it gonna reverberate with an audience? Humanity?
How uniquely American is The Lehman Trilogy?
Howard: It's uniquely American in the sense of specifically talking about the story when they hit New York. The influence that they had on New York City, on the development of the city, on America, on the Panama Canal, on capitalism... This is a play about three Bavarian Jews that come to America, and their family become Americans, but it was developed by a British director and actors. When it was workshopped there were no Americans involved. I think all the actors were from the UK, about 12 of them. They had all this text and they worked it and whittled it down, and whittled it down… I joked about how it was probably a very tense month for the actors because you get the job and you're calling your parents going guess what I'm doing?, the new Sam Mendes masterpiece, workshopping the new segment, and then the next week two people are gone. You're like, I'm still here. The next week, you're going “I made it to week three!”
Like theatrical Survivor!
Howard: If Simon Russell Beale supposedly had his way, it would have been a one man show. And I'm sure Simon could do it!
Aaron: Is this a good time to confess I've been lobbying for that as well!? [All laugh]
There's a recurrent motif of sitting Shiva. When the first brother dies, they sit Shiva properly. But as the company grows, and as the different descendants of Lehman Brothers die off, the ability to hold that Jewish tradition fades as the world grows into this increasingly capitalist Zeitgeist. What are we supposed to take from that?
Aaron: My understanding is that his father hooked Stefano Massini [author of The Lehman Trilogy] up with a rabbi because he was a bit frenetic, and that’s where he gets his ‘Jewish flavor’ and his Jewish history and his Hebrew. All the Jewishness of the play comes from that experience. I don't think he ever converted, but I believe it was profoundly instrumental to his being as he grew up. It's told through an American medium, and that's vital to it, but the human story, to me, is about the loss of connection to the other. The loss of proper worship. As Bob Dylan says, you gotta serve somebody. Even those who say, ‘I believe in nothing’, you're serving something, whatever it is – perhaps money, sex, work ambition. But to me it's about that proper worship, and the time we take. Especially now, in an age of social media, we're going so fast, probably faster than our systems are built to handle, whether that's travel or the ability to communicate. Some of which is terrific – I can get from New York to London in seven hours – but I think that's a profound loss that the players are dealing with.
Do you think it has anything new to say to the cultural moment we're in now, in 2024, that's different from when the piece was first performed in 2018?
Howard: There's one obvious thing, it's a comedic moment, but there's a line at the beginning of Act 3 that John has, about Henry as the Greek diner owner, about mask wearing...
John: Yeah, “he crossed the country because everyone was ill and dying”...
Howard: That line of course gets a huge reaction now, which you wouldn't have gotten at all pre-COVID. Now it's like, “you knew!”, and we just didn't!
For people who love the theater and weren’t able to see any for a while, to have this be one of the first things you experienced post-COVID was pretty special. I think that the world needed this piece. One of the things that Sam is incredible at is bringing elements together. Sometimes the set is in control, the physical structure tells us how to tell the story. Sometimes it's the lights, or the screen, or a lot of times the piano is the actor of the piece, playing a score throughout the entire play. It's not just a collaboration of actors that have good chemistry, although I think that we do, but the piece itself is an amazing thing that’s going to go well if you ride the ride, just get on and tell the story. What makes it fun is when you have that extra chemistry, things that we can do on stage that the audience wouldn't be aware of that I probably shouldn't mention in this interview because Sam might get mad! Things like trying to make each other laugh, that adds something special. It adds a spark to any job you do when you love who you're working with and when you love what you're doing. This is everything – costume, everything – everyone is equal and everyone we're working with is at the top of their game.You just about get used to one actor excelling in one particular role and then they are in an entirely new role 10 minutes later, an entirely different persona. That must be incredibly demanding.
John: It's demanding, but also that's the excitement of it. That's the element of play at its purest form. There's a sort of a childlike quality to it. We're trying to obviously do it as seriously as as we can, but there is a wonderful exuberance to it, which I think audiences enjoy and actors enjoy and that gives you a real lift.
I was just thinking about your really good question about what's changed since 2018. There's a refrain that goes through the play of ‘everything changed again’. I feel like a lot of the success of the Lehman Brothers was down to that adaptability, to be able to adapt to the seismic things that were happening in the culture and society at that time. And we’ve had wave after wave of things happening in the world, whether that's COVID or Ukraine or Gaza. You can look at it cynically, like with COVID and companies getting those dodgy contracts. I’m not saying the Lehmans were guilty of that, but they were able to spot the opportunity in a crisis. Also the inequality gap feels like it's getting exponentially larger, and here you have this company where they're building a house of cards and it's getting higher and higher. Our metaphor is a tightrope walker, and it feels like we're not million miles away from the Wall Street crash of the 1920s. And there’s the rise of populism, and Trump, riding that wave of discontent. It feels like there's a lot in the play which is speaking very loudly to the present moment.When I saw it, it did blow me away, but there's a risk with this kind of story, because it's monumental in scope, epic in its proportions – does it romanticize something that's ultimately led to worldwide misery and (as you mentioned) inequality? Does it romanticize capitalism too much?
John: I think it plays its cards quite smartly. The flip side is, you can see it as a cautionary tale. There is something seductive about the design and how the story is told that is hopefully gripping enough that you are, to a certain extent, on this family's side, yet they create this Frankenstein's monster.
That's also very ‘now’, having sympathetic characters who are a little morally ambiguous?
Aaron: Well, it's funny because it's a thread I haven't pulled that much in rehearsals, but there are nights where towards the end of Act One Meyer is is saying ‘I gotta hold on to the south’. He’s not saying ‘we gotta get those slaves back here’, but everything, as Beauchamp says to him, is built on it. What you're saying about the moral ambiguity of it is very true. It’s tricky to put your finger on when they went wrong in the play – but it’s right there. When sweet young Henry [one of the original Lehman brothers] shows up in New York, there he stands with his brand new shoes and the thrill of this vision, but back where he’s from a Jew is not a full person, very much in the way that a slave is not a full person. There's a nice connection there.
Howard: I want to add to what Aaron's saying that, as storytellers, we have to tell the story, not comment on it. I have a line as a biracial black man in America, after the Civil Wars, that the war took down the arrogance of the South and drew about the shame of slavery; all are free now, all are equal. And, you know, Howard doesn't believe that. We're not all equal. But Emanuel believes it.
This play doesn't try to tell you what to think. There's a monologue that John as Henry has, about capitalism making people buy, buy, buy; people will buy even things that they don't need, and that's a terrible thing. That's when it really started, when poor people couldn’t afford things and everyone got into installments and debt. But you deliver it brilliantly, John like it's an exciting thing. The other thing is that anytime I've been involved with a piece of work that might deal with race, or religion, there is a desire from the audience for it to be all encompassing, for it to cover everything. There's a playwright named Dael Orlandersmith, who’s a black woman. I did a show with her called Yellowman, that’s about light skinned versus darker skin within the black community. People were very moved by it, but then some would say why didn't you mention this? She said, why is it that every time a black person writes a play they have to include everything? Why can't I just write the story? No-one says, Eugene O'Neill or Sam Shepard, hey, you didn't put this in. I agree with John, I think that this play falls perfectly right. It doesn't get out of the lines. I'm hopeful we're presenting it honestly.I want to ask you one question that we ask all of our interviewees. What is the best...
Howard: Ice cream flavor? Cherry Garcia!
The question is actually, what is the best thing about being you? We’ll take it in turns. What’s the best thing about being Howard Overshown right now?
Howard: Someone asked me, What's your goal? I said, stay married to my wife – my lifelong goal. I'm married to an amazing woman. But I will also say it's doing the show, man. I've never had more fun. It doesn't get any better than what we're doing. Script, direction, design, crew, costumes, everything, I do not take this lightly. Get ready, UK here I come! I’m serious. It's a dream for me. This doesn't get any better, man, I've been involved with a masterpiece.
And what's the best thing of being John Heffernan right now?
John: Well this interview is happening on the first day of the summer holidays for me so I'd have to say my kids – I get six whole weeks with my children. But yeah, I can only echo what Howard said. It's just an amazing show. I'm really looking forward to it. It's a treat to do for actors. It's stretches every muscle, physically, mentally. I’ve had an absolute blast doing it in San Francisco with these two, and I'm really excited about doing it in London.
Aaron, you've had a bit of time to think about your answer. So what's the best thing about being Aaron Krohn right now?
Aaron: We can all have self actualization, right? How are we ourselves and happy regardless of what we get to do, or what job we have. I thought of my wife and my daughter, one of whom is on the floor singing right now, I won't tell you which one. And I have a rock band here, we're going to play at the Stratford Festival at Plaza Regis Hall, which is the most formal gig we've ever had, so I'm very excited about that. And of course, I'm thrilled, thrilled, thrilled to be going to the West End to do this play with these two guys.
And I can't wait to see you guys in it!
