'Being human': Actor Peter Frechette on 'The Lehman Trilogy' at Austin's Zach Theatre

You can't help but watch him.

Even when he shares the stage with other magnetic actors, Peter Frechette holds your attention.

In "The Lehman Trilogy," a three-act drama currently at Zach Theatre, Frechette plays business co-founder Henry Lehman, but also more than two dozen other characters in a story that stretches over three centuries and ends with the financial crisis of 2008.

Two years ago, Frechette (fruh-SHET) portrayed two essential characters in director Dave Steakley's unforgettable, 2-part "The Inheritance" at Zach.

In any circumstance, you always notice when he keeps still. You follow him as he moves. You listen more attentively when he speaks.

Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle.

Reared and trained in Rhode Island, Frechette has made the rounds of Broadway, movies and television, winning multiple Tony Award and Emmy Award nominations, among other honors.

These days, he shines in regional theater. For instance, he served as part of the company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., for five years. Now based in Atlanta, where he teaches acting, Frechette came to the attention of director Steakley through a play reading in Austin produced by the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project.

The elaborate scale of the human stories told in "The Lehman Trilogy" fits his attraction to steep challenges.

"All acting is solving problems," Frechette says. "And this play is a giant organism. I and my fellow actors, along with our director, Dave — everybody! — work to answer a massive number of questions to tell this story like it is."

'Without the old ego'

During the 1970s, in the theater department at University of Rhode Island, Frechette, now 67, benefited from the "roll up your sleeves and live in the moment" style of training of the era.

"It was quite a different time," he says. "Funkier. We were looser. There wasn't any idea of commodification. That formed who I became. I'm fairly allergic to commodification and branding and striving for perfection. It's fine to aim for perfect, but perfect isn't possible because we are human."

As such, Frechette is comfortable with being called a "humanist" under certain definitional conditions. He likes to explore the connections between people and the larger world, as well as their spirituality.

Given the fluidity of his vocal and physical performances, one might reasonably guess that Frechette was classically trained.

"I'm not," Frechette says. "Classical training can be a wonderful help, though. Being in true possession of your instrument helps us to be truthful on stage, where the audience is sitting far away. We learn to radiate intimacy and energy a large number of feet from our core to make palpable contact with the back row. We allow the audience to come to us, just as we are at the same time giving ourselves to the audience. It's satisfying for the actors and the audience.

"And if you think about it, people more and more accustomed to watch stories on screens. As an audience, we want to be absorbed in stories without thinking: 'Oh wow, look at the actors acting.'"

In 2022, in Matthew Lopez's two-part play, "The Inheritance," inspired by E.M. Forster's classic novel, "Howards End," Frechette played gentle, closeted author Forster in the first part, and dying, sometimes outraged Howard Poole in both parts.

"Forster is one of my very favorite writers," Frechette says. "Both characters are so interesting, weird, sweet, nerdy, bizarre, with Forster a ghost and sort of a mentor. He has something unfinished, something tangible. He needs to help them to help himself.

"And the character Henry, too, is totally out of his time, but also strange, nerdy, deeply eccentric and emotional. A quiet storm. I had an entrée into each of them, but didn't know where to go with them at first, which is an acting problem I love. In 'Lehman,' there's first the challenge of it, playing three brothers in the 19th century, and carrying the story through to this century. I didn't know where to begin, which is really why I wanted to do it."

Frechette worried that, at this point, he might have "lost just enough brain cells" not to remember the volume of lines — each of the three main actors in "Lehman" is responsible for more than an hour of speaking. Yet recently, he had memorized two Truman Capote novels for a performance, and he played Roy Cohn in "Angels in America" at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.

That's a lot of remembering.

Frechette spent many years racing from role to role on stage and screen, but more recently he has taken each engaging part one at a time.

"I thought: Why am I doing this?" Frechette says about his mid-career crisis. "Maybe I would never act again. But I stoped worrying about stature and status. I no longer care about that. More and more, I just love the acting itself. My career seems amorphous, ephemeral. My vocation now is to teach, which, in turn, makes me want to act, but without the old ego."

'And so much to think about!'

How did "The Lehman Trilogy" end up at Zach?

Directory Steakley saw the show at London's National Theatre when it was the "must-see" play of the season. He prepped for the three-hour epic about the rise and fall of the Lehman brothers' financial empire with plenty of caffeine, then was surprised at its immediacy.

"I was riveted and and deeply engrossed from the moment the three brothers from Bavaria arrived in America in search of a new life, through the collapse of the firm they established, which triggered the largest financial crisis in history," Steakley writes for the show's printed program. "The theatrical storytelling that followed the fortunes of this singular immigrant family moved like a good binge-worthy series where you don't want it to end.

"And with so much to think about!"

The brothers — Henry, Mayer and Emanuel — build their businesses from general stores and apparel shops to commodity trading and, eventually, by way of their descendants and other company leaders, through many circuitous developments, to the dreaded subprime mortgage loans, their ultimate downfall.

Steakley has staged this wide-screen story on scenic designer Sotirios Livaditis' awe-inspiring set, which combines the substantial elements of a traditional 19th-century banking structure with a wall of flashing images that brings to mind digital impulses, all frequently shifting under Benjamin Gantose's lights. (As seen in a technical rehearsal before opening night.)

If you think three hours is long, Ben Power's play is adapted from Stefano Massini's nine-hour poem on the subject, which includes insights into the titular family's enduring culture. 

"Stefano Massini was nine when his father saved the life of a Jewish employee in his factory," Steakley writes. "The worker asked his boss what he could do in return for saving him. When Massini's father complained that the young Stefano was a terror, the employee said he would enroll him in his synagogue's religious school.

"Stefano studied in an Italian school in the morning and at the synagogue in the afternoon, where he had his first exposure to theater in the synagogue basement. For him, the Jewish world, Jewish culture, Jewish literature is the language of theater, and of invention, and that is the reason his books are so full of Jewish culture as an outsider. The plays deals not only with the Lehmans' Judaism, but also with their status as outsiders."

That's one theme that ties "The Lehman Trilogy" to "The Inheritance" — how outsiders deal with a complicated moral world and how they do or do not manipulate it.

To Frechette, that might make the characters more interestingly "human."

After all, to Frechette, acting is "people expressing being human."

'The Lehman Trilogy'

When: Various times through July 7

Where: The Topfer at Zach Theatre, 202 S. Lamar Blvd.

Tickets: From $25

Info:zachtheatre.org