It’s not hard to see the draw of “The Lehman Trilogy” — a Tony Award-winning epic that requires each of three actors to play multiple roles and navigate with near-trapeze-like coordination across a stage heaped with clutter.
What convinced Anish Jethmalani to take on the challenge was the idea that, in the real-life immigrant tale of brothers Henry Lehman (played by Mitchell J. Fain), Mayer Lehman (played by Joey Slotnick) and Emanuel Lehman (Jethmalani’s character), he could mine the struggles, delights and surprises of his own origin story.
Jethmalani said he started talking with the show’s co-director Nick Bowling about a year ago.
“I was fascinated with this idea of what does [the American dream] mean to any immigrant family that’s coming here to achieve that, and what is the cost in wanting to achieve it?” Jethmalani said in an interview.
In the Lehman brothers’ story, Henry Lehman, a young Bavarian Jew, arrives in America in 1844, hanging his shingle on a shop opening through a door with a “handle that sticks” in Montgomery, Alabama. His brothers follow him across the Atlantic, and we watch as their little “fabrics and suits” store grows into a raw cotton trading post. And then it’s on to New York, where the company reaches spectacular heights before the well-chronicled Lehman Brothers investment banking company’s crash in 2008.
For Jethmalani, who is a first-generation American, the cost to his parents of leaving their home in India in the early 1970s wasn’t apocalyptic but still painful. They left family behind as they searched for a better life in Chicago.
“The only way to keep in touch was to write a letter or make long-distance phone calls that cost you an arm and a leg,” said Jethmalani, who was born in Uptown. “The other aspect of that, too, was not knowing what their chances of success would be.”
Jethmalani’s father followed a familiar path for many new arrivals trying to make a living in this new country — driving a taxi and an ice cream truck — until he could put his engineering degree to better use. Jethmalani sometimes accompanied his dad, handing out ice cream to kids.
His mother had a theater background, “not the norm” for an Indian woman at that time.
“Even back then, for my mother to do something like that was pretty rebellious,” Jethmalani said.
In Chicago, she directed plays — sometimes in Hindi — at community centers and wherever else the actors could find space. Glittering costumes and props filled cabinets, the basement, a garden shed at the Jethmalani home in the suburbs. Some costumes were imported from India.
Jethmalani first stepped on stage when he was 7, in a production of “Cinderalla.” The lines were in Gujarati, one of the more widely spoken languages in India.
“It was definitely nerve-wracking; that’s where I cut my teeth — being in front of an audience and building up my nerve to perform and find my passion for it,” he said.
Jethmalani has since appeared on TV and in film. He is a company member of TimeLine Theatre and has worked on stages including the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Lookingglass Theatre.
He said the bravery of his mother — who was in her 40s when she died about 30 years ago — helped pave the way for his acting life.
“It would have been more difficult for me had I not had that,” Jethmalani said. “There would have been much more resistance and pushback.”
“The Lehman Trilogy” deals with, among other things, how the pursuit of capitalism can erode cultural and family identity.
Jethmalani sees a loss in his own community. When he was a kid, his parents would take him and his sister to Devon Avenue on weekends to shop for items including Indian snacks and spices.
“You had so many people converge there to meet that you had that sense of community more prevalent than you do maybe today,” he said, noting that, as later generations of South Asians have moved to the suburbs, they have set up their own “mini-Devons.”
Jethmalani said his father saw “Trilogy” in previews and saw something of himself in Henry, the brother who arrives in America after a 45-day sea crossing.
“He identified with that quite a bit,” Jethmalani said. “My dad really worked very hard to get established here.”
Even as many Americans remain divided over immigration in this country, Jethmalani has a unifying hope for those who see the show:
“I hope they can take away a little bit of why immigrants come here to begin with and what is the beauty of America that still attracts people — and what does it mean to them when they talk about the American dream.”
