A Role of His Lifetime

As the central figure in “Hurrah at Last,” the new satire at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Peter Frechette puts a desperate question to all his nearest and dearest: “How much money do you have?”

Nobody will tell him, of course; not because they’re too poor or too rich to say, or because they’re tight--on the contrary, they’re only too willing to give him money--but because his question (it becomes a refrain) is a cry from the heart for anything but money: All he wants from them is honesty, reality, facts.

“There are unending reasons why I love playing Laurie,” Frechette says. “One is that I used to be poor, although I never cared how much money people were making. My identification with him is strong because I understand what that question means.

“It’s not a status thing,” he adds, “as much as where he stands with the world. People will reveal anything but how much money they have. The question is: ‘Will you go to that really private place with me?’ That’s what Laurie wants to know.”

If Frechette looked exactly like Laurie in a recent interview at the theater--lean, dark and sharp-featured--he was nevertheless more relaxed; and he sounded slightly different, the New England accent of his native Providence, R.I., supplanting the New York inflections of his role.

Playwright Richard Greenberg has said that after he finished “Hurrah at Last,” he realized that Laurie (a novelist surrounded by adoring friends as well as wealthy relatives) had been written with Frechette “subconsciously” in mind.

Frechette, more widely known for his television roles--he was an Emmy-nominated regular on “thirtysomething” and currently appears in NBC’s “Profiler”--is one of the playwright’s favorite actors and has portrayed other Greenberg characters.

The first, on Broadway in 1989, was gay painter Drew, a bright young man, in “Eastern Standard,” which earned him a Tony nomination for featured actor. One of Drew’s quippy lines to flag down an attractive food-server in a Manhattan restaurant--”Oh, actress!”--became a classic crack in theater circles.

“I actually auditioned for ‘Eastern Standard’ on camera in a hotel room in Beverly Hills,” says Frechette, who lives in the San Fernando Valley with director David Warren and keeps an apartment in New York.

“I had never heard of Rich before. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t see how I could possibly get this.’ Nobody was there. It was just a few guys who brought a little camera. But, wow! I was astounded at how much I loved the writing.”

Several months later, Frechette was in New York recording the cast album of Kander and Ebb’s “Flora the Red Menace”--the revised version that made a splash off-Broadway in 1987--when he got the callback for “Eastern Standard.”

“Drew is somewhat related to Laurie, even though they’re quite different,” said Frechette, who also earned a Tony nomination for his starring role in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s “Our Country’s Good” in 1991. “There’s something inside both characters, something essential that’s similar in each of them.”

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His two other Greenberg roles, both at SCR, were darker: TV network producer Dan Enright, a Machiavellian puppet master, in “Night and Her Stars” (1995), and Keith, the title character of “The Extra Man” (1991), everybody’s helpful friend who’s really a snake in the grass.

“I had enormous trouble with ‘The Extra Man,’ ” Frechette recalls. “But I had a lot of fun with Enright once I realized there wasn’t a single thing inside me that I could bring to the role. There was something opaque about him. I constructed him from the outside in.”

Laurie, Greenberg’s alter ego in “Hurrah at Last,” is by contrast as transparent as glass; Frechette seems to fit the role as snugly as the raincoat Laurie won’t take off.

“So much was already there on the page,” Frechette noted. “I’ve heard Rich say that this is a play with virtually no subtext. It’s not entirely true, but I know what he means: Laurie just tells the truth all the time.”

* “Hurrah at Last” continues on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesday-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. $28-$43. Ends June 28. (714) 708-5555.