How “Banksters” caused the great depression and led to the Glass-Steagall Banking Act.

The aftermath of a financial panic bread lines, foreclosures, falls from great power make for good drama. The causes of one, not so much. The Oscar-winning film, The Big Short shows how creative you have to get to explain the flaws of a collateralized debt obligation.

That hasnt deterred a small Seattle theater company, whose new play, The Reckoning: Pecora for the Public, portrays Ferdinand Pecora and the 1933 congressional commission he ran 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 that split their commercial and investment operations.

Some blame the repeal of those restrictions for the financial crisis of 2008, and the plays author, Neil Thomas Proto, believes that grants the story urgency. The kind of conduct that Wall Street bankers and their lawyers engaged in will be strikingly familiar to people, he says, referring to the money manipulations that benefited themselves and their friends.

A single actor (Seattle stage veteran Bob DeDea, directed by Arne Zaslove) plays Pecora, along with around 20 other characters, to render the hearings that called powerful financial heads or banksters, as Pecora would call them to account. Nose-to-nose battles over the width of a conference table with titans like Charley Mitchell, head of National City Bank (now Citibank) produced front-page revelations of interest-free loans to themselves amid staggering shareholder losses.

Protos own expertise is as an attorney and lecturer at Georgetown University (as well as University of Washington School of Law). Longtime involvement on the boards of the Long Wharf and Schubert theaters in New Haven drew him to write his first play, inspired by the lack of a Pecora-style investigation in response to the 2008 meltdown.

Those hearings, Proto notes, helped teach the public, which he hopes his play will do as well. The deals of that era were no less complicated, 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.

— Gianni Truzzi

The Reckoning: Pecora For the Public is presented by The Repertory Collective at The Cornish Playhouse Alhadeff Studio at Seattle Center, 201 Mercer St., March 3 to 19. Tickets ar $25 with discounts for seniors, military and students at https://pecora.brownpapertickets.com.