Directed by Sam Mendes, the National Theatre’s staging of Stefano Massini’s 2013 play The Lehman Trilogy (which is at the Nederlander Theater through January 2) came to New York’s Park Avenue Armory in 2019, but its planned spring 2020 Broadway debut was postponed for more than a year. Only ninety-nine performances were booked for Broadway, which is a shame because this enthralling piece epitomizes what theater can be: magnificent to regard, trenchantly written, full of fascinating historical information, and deftly acted by a cast of three. It’s a rare masterpiece whose like comes along once every several years, if that often; the only play I’ve seen on Broadway in the last five years that was nearly as good was Mendes’s own previous effort, The Ferryman, the ira drama by Jez Butterworth that captured the 2018–19 Tony for best play.

It’s hard to say whether the director, the author, or the actors have the most marvelous impact in The Lehman Trilogy’s three-hour gallop through 160 years of American history as experienced and in many ways shaped by three immigrant brothers and the institution they created, which fell in spectacular fashion on a grim day in 2008. Though the play is long, staged with two intermissions, it moves with electrical efficiency, and I could happily have sat through a much longer presentation. (The play as written runs five hours; what we are seeing is a truncated version. A television adaptation springing from the