On Reflection: Who will be Our Pecora?

Eight years on, it seems were still trying to make sense of the financial meltdown, with films like Margin Call, The Big Short and Money Monster grappling with the facts, fixations and fury of that upheaval.

A small Seattle theater company called The Repertory Collective joined the fray in March, noting how we confronted this before. Its world premiere of The Reckoning, Pecora for the Public portrayed Ferdinand Pecora and the 1933 congressional commission he used to investigate the causes of the Great Depression. The soft-spoken, determined former prosecutor exposed the abusive practices of the powerful banks and spurred passage of the Glass-Steagall Banking Act, which split their commercial and investment operations.

Some blame the repeal of those restrictions for the financial crisis of 2008, and the play uses the testimony of those hearings to reveal the money manipulations that benefited financial barons and their friends. Author Neil Thomas Proto believes the kind of conduct that Wall Street bankers and their lawyers engaged in will be strikingly familiar to people.

Seattle stage veteran Bob DeDea played Pecora, along with some 20 other characters, rendering alone the nose-to-nose battles that occurred across the width of a conference table. Titans like Charley Mitchell, head of National City Bank (now Citibank), were soon labeled banksters in the front-page revelations of interest-free loans to themselves amid staggering shareholder losses.

Protos own expertise is as an attorney and lecturer, including at the University of Washington School of Law. The Pecora hearings, he says, helped teach the public about deals that were no less complicated than the collateralized debt obligations of today. But the manner in which Pecora asked the questions and the manner in which the bankers were compelled to answer made the explanation of these seemingly complex financial transactions easy, he notes.

Proto and director Arne Zaslove can claim some victory at making those events engaging and clear, succeeding best where powerful wills collide. The details can be numbing, but the desire for comprehension is sustained. Watching the mighty be brought to account prompts the desire for a Pecora of our own.