It was 2008 when the financial services firm Lehman Brothers collapsed, helping to set off a global financial panic — a crisis sparked by the excessive risks taken by big banks that included Lehman itself.

But "The Lehman Trilogy," now at the Park Avenue Armory after a sold out run at London's National Theatre, doesn't focus on this tumultuous time. Instead, it transforms the history of the firm into an elegy on the tragedy of American capitalism. 

It starts in 1844 with German immigrant Henry Lehman's arrival in America. The story is told in third person by three extraordinary British actors — Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles — who both intimately inhabit the brothers, their families and their associates, and yet maintain a storyteller-like distance that transforms the drama into something that feels mythic: "Children yelling/the creak of metal and squeak of pulleys/and in the midst of it all,/there he is./Silent, still,/just off the boat/wearing his best shoes,/the ones he'd never worn/the ones he kept in storage for that moment when/I will be in America."

Henry is soon followed by his two brothers; they open a general store in Alabama, and from there start selling raw cotton. The tale continues on through 169 years of history, generation after generation, following the family as it sheds its pious Jewish roots (and all of its principals) for the new, cold faith of capitalism and, subsequently, American excess. By the time the character of Bobby Lehman declares in the 1960s that his firm will control the world, the strong relationships that had characterized the three founding brothers — their ties to spouses and siblings and the community — were a distant memory.

The language, and the compelling way the story is told, makes the piece sound like a radio play - which the original Italian version by Stefano Massini was, before it toured Europe as a stage work. But in director Sam Mendes's hands, it's a theatrical triumph, with the three actors moving through a rotating glass box with a large, enveloping video screen behind it, that becomes everything from the Civil War-torn South to a 1960s boardroom.

Perhaps all of that makes this work sound a bit — well, dour. But it's not like that at all. Thanks to the comic gifts of all three actors, it is desperately funny, and moving, and entertaining, speeding through so quickly that it's almost a shock to discover it's over. 

This is a magnificent work, almost Shakespearean in its scope in the way it delves into the dark side of human nature, and in the profound empathy it has for these deeply flawed characters.  It may be a British production based on the work of an Italian playwright, but it somehow intimately understands both the triumph and the tragedy of America.