"Six Feet Under" Star Peter Krause Heads Roundabout Revival of After the Fall

By Robert Simonson
and Ernio Hernandez
11 Mar 2004

Peter Krause in HBO's "Six Feet Under"
Peter Krause in HBO's "Six Feet Under"
Photo by HBO

Peter Krause, of "Six Feet Under" fame, will star in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Arthur Miller's drama After The Fall, set to begin previews June 25 at the American Airlines Theatre towards an opening on July 29.

Miller's play, which many believe is autobiographical, will be under the direction of Michael Mayer — who directed Miller's A View From the Bridge for Roundabout in 1997. Krause will play the lead role of lawyer Quentin, historically viewed as a stand-in for author Miller.

After the Fall follows a lawyer in his forties who journeys into his past to discover how he ended up where he is. In his soul-searching quest, he revisits the death of his mother and a line of failed relationships, including one with a famous singer troubled by an addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol — believed by many to mirror the author's marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

The design team for After The Fall will feature Richard Hoover (sets) and Michael Krass (costumes). Additional casting and creative team will be announced shortly.

The play debuted on Broadway in 1964 with Jason Robards, Jr. in the lead role and Barbara Loden as the singer — a turn that won her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress. Hal Holbrook and Faye Dunaway also appeared in the work staged by Miller's oft-collaborator Elia Kazan.

Krause, who plays the older brother in the family who owns and runs a funeral home on HBO's "Six Feet Under." The Minneapolis native who began his acting career at New York University — where he starred in productions of Macbeth, Uncle Vanya and Arms and the Man — will make his Broadway debut in After The Fall. He made his television debut on the variety show, "Carol and Company" and also appeared on "Cybill." He is well-known for his role as a sportcaster on the Aaron Sorkin short-lived television (but Emmy Award-winning) series "Sports Night." Krause can also be seen in the movie "We Don't Live Here Anymore."

Roundabout has also produced Miller's The Price (1992) and The Man Who Had All The Luck (2002) and had a hand in recent revivals of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

"I got a lot of ideas about how to work on it," Mayer previously said to Playbill On-Line. "It's a flawed masterpiece, I think. I met with Arthur a few times now to discuss what to do with it. I've got some ideas and he's very open to that. It's not so much rewriting as restructuring. Cutting and restructuring, I would say. I think the words are all there. He seemed very amenable."

"The inner journey of the protagonist," Mayer said attracted him to the play. "It's so psychologically rich: This man is sort of doing this exhaustive soul-searching and every betrayal and every infraction and every sort of challenge to understanding about what decency is — through his whole life — comes flooding back in a kind of stream of-consciousness way. It was very ahead of its time, I think. You see this man doing real battle with his demons with all the people in his life. You feel like before he can move forward and accept the love of a new woman in his life, he's got to somehow get beyond all the other relationships that have plagued him, and his own inadequacies and his own failings and the betrayals he has endured or witnessed — and the betrayals that he has actually perpetrated. I think it's a great, great play."

Tickets will be available in May 2004 by calling Roundabout Ticket Services at (212) 719-1300 or at the box office of the American Airlines Theatre (227 West 42nd Street). For more information, visit www.roundabouttheatre.org .