the lady-killer; As Peter Krause leaps from the funeral parlor to the Broadway stage, Adam Green takes notes.('After the Fall' by Arthur Miller)

Byline: Adam Green

The theater director Michael Mayer describes Arthur Miller as an "incredibly charismatic guy" who, even at 88, "maintains a fantastic collaboration between brains and sex." So it's no surprise that when Mayer was casting the lead for this month's revival of Miller's semiautobiographical After the Fall, he sought out an actor with a similar mix of intellectual and carnal appeal. As the brooding, ambivalent undertaker Nate Fisher on HBO's Six Feet Under, Peter Krause, at 38, has become the thinking (if morbid) woman's heartthrob, proving that Freud was onto something when he said that sex and death go hand in hand.

These competing impulses are central to After the Fall, which unfolds in the mind of a conscience-stricken lawyer haunted by the Holocaust, the McCarthy hearings, and the ghosts of his past. As Quentin, Krause ruthlessly examines a lifetime of failed relationships-with his parents, his friends, his wives, and his lovers. Searching for hope in a world of lost innocence, he also seeks absolution. Both Quentin and Nate are "conflicted modern heroes who struggle to do the right thing-whatever that is," the actor says. "They're sifting through the rubble of their lives, trying to figure out what happened and where to go next."

Krause began his career on the boards in a high school production of Charley's Aunt. (A back injury had sidelined him from pole-vaulting, and he wanted to meet a girl in the cast.) During his grad-student years in NYU's drama program, Broadway audiences got their first glimpse of the young actor-selling drinks ...