Since its American debut at the Park Avenue Armory last month, “The Lehman Trilogy” has had New Yorkers of a certain breed held tightly at the forearms. A play about money and decline, it has been chewed over by those still on top.

The show was virtually sold out long before it opened, with tickets for the best seats costing more than $400. Tickets for some of the final performances have now reached $2,000 on StubHub, at which point you might consider flying to London — the production returns there next month — spending a night at Claridge’s and buying a royal-baby saltshaker with whatever is left.

We are lingering in a moment in which there is a fashion, or even a giddiness, for spending large sums of money on theatrical experiences that explore the foundations and promises of American capitalism. Commenting on the success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s singular effort in this vein, The Harvard Business Review ran a piece three years ago titled: “Hamilton’s $849 Tickets Are Priced Too Low.” The point was that there were so many people with plenty of money desperate to see the show that too much power was redounding to scalpers.

But the fact that there were — and remain — so many people willing to spend so many hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a single evening of live theater suggests something else as well. Technology has so democratized the consumption of culture — much of it of impressively high quality — that it is possible for virtually anyone to stream nearly anything at any time. Naturally, a new system of status was bound to evolve. The housekeeper can watch “The Crown,” but only the mistress of the penthouse can see the musical sensation that has won 11 Tony Awards on her own schedule.

During its run, “Springsteen on Broadway” had tickets that sold for as much as $850. But resale platforms made them available for many times that — so it was possible to pay $8,000 to immerse yourself in Bruce’s world of vanished working-class hope. Or you might have realized that if you had that kind of money lying around to spend on two hours at the theater, you may be the root from which the problem weed is spreading.

The “Lehman Trilogy” has in its soul a critique of these imbalances, but its criticisms are facile and anodyne enough to offend no one benefiting from them. A history play, enacted by performers of incredible stamina who spend close to three and a half hours on stage, it tells the story of the Lehman brothers — Henry, Emanuel and Mayer — from their arrival in the United States as poor Bavarian immigrants in the middle of the 19th century to the downfall of the bank they eventually created, more than 150 years later.

Coming to this country, the Lehmans went straight to Montgomery, Ala., where the cotton business was roaring. They opened a dry goods store but at some point epiphany struck. They realized they could potentially make lots of money serving as middlemen between local cotton plantations and northern mills. The play is not entirely blind to the flaws of its characters but bundles up sufficiently under the pup tent of hagiography to have us assume that the Lehman brothers invented the notion of brokering, a tradition that predates them by at least a millennium. (The word “broker,” just so you can keep this fact on hand, derives from “broceur,” meaning “small trader” in a style of regional French spoken in the eighth century.) Cotton led to business in other commodities and ultimately to money lending and a banking empire.

The play’s creator, the Italian dramatist Stefano Massini, mines a well-established idea: that as the Lehmans, and by extension modern capitalism, moved further and further away from the intimate business of buying and selling tangible things to focus on shifting money around for maximum profit — developing abstract financial instruments that ordinary people could not possibly understand — virtue gave way to corruption.

“The Lehman Trilogy’’ is not an angry play; it would like you to believe that the greed of dynasties and the values of bloodline are superior to those of the scrappy interlopers who inherit corporate lines of succession when the founding families have either died off or retreated to lives of spirituality.

In Mr. Massini’s understanding, trouble found its true engine when the last of the actual Lehmans ran Lehman Brothers and management was given over to the ambitious roughnecks in the trading division rather than the well-mannered investment bankers who had been in charge. Something precious was gone. But what exactly?

By completely omitting something terribly obvious — that the original fortune was made on the backs of slaves — the play suggests that the real evildoers were not the kindly young men from Bavaria who sold cloth and simply saw expanding opportunities but the 21st-century financiers who ignited an economic crash, besotted by the idea of bundling subprime mortgages into tranches.

“The Lehman Trilogy” coaxes you into leaving with sober skepticism about the complexities of modern finance that you probably already had before the curtain rose. It just won’t let you feel too guilty about it.

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