The New Group’s world premiere production of Sharr White’s The True opens with three central characters, two male and one female, on stage, all lifted from not-too-distant history. The men occupy the right and left sides, seated in comfortable chairs, while the woman sits between and slightly in back of them, perched at a sewing machine. The arrangement, which will be reproduced in the play’s final scene, is telling, for Dorothea “Polly” Noonan—the Democratic power broker played here, indelibly, by Edie Falco—is closely attached and indispensable to both men, though the world she lives in is not prepared to allow her equal footing with either of them.
It’s 1977 in Albany, New York, and Polly—outspoken, salty-tongued and relentless—is confronting a looming crisis for Erastus Corning II, the mayor she has advised, defended and probably loved throughout his 30-year-plus term. The other guy in the room is Peter Noonan, Polly’s devoted husband and, despite his relative disinterest in political drama, Erastus’s steadfast friend.
Erastus, played by Michael McKean with a canny balance of erudition and boorishness, is a humane variation on the kind of polished good ole boy who has thrived in both establishment parties, a seemingly expert manipulator of the Albany machine that comes into clearer, more gruesome focus around this time every election year. In The True, Polly emerges as both the heart and the brains of that machine, or at least as fundamental to those organs as anyone with a Y chromosome; Peter—a lovely vehicle for Peter Scolari, who brings both an easy grace and weariness to the role—is a foil to both the others: patient, even-tempered, accepting of the limitations and curve balls life throws us.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
White draws the triangle with a thoughtfulness and nuance that feel like rare gifts in our current climate. One factor that’s gone underappreciated amid all the righteous indignation and overdue comeuppance brought on by the #MeToo movement is the potential for real, mutual attraction to develop in work relationships, and the complex challenges that can result. In Polly, we have a female character who suffers not because of one man’s predatory behavior, but because of the enduring perception that any personal bond between a woman and man working together—be it a friendship or something more intimate (or longing for the latter)—makes the woman’s motives and competence suspect.
The mayor hardly emerges as a noble figure, cutting Polly off from his campaign when it seems expedient to do so. “It’s complicated,” Erastus offers lamely, after that strategy backfires. Polly also faces individual male antagonists ranging from the privileged political upstart threatening to unseat Erastus (a just-oily-enough Glenn Fitzgerald) to an embittered party veteran—the excellent John Pankow, all raggedy bluster—who sneeringly dismisses her as Erastus’s “special friend.”
Polly responds to these betrayals and accusations as many strong-minded, self-possessed women, and men, would: with great frustration. She is not beyond weeping—or complaining about her hair, for that matter, or using that sewing machine to make clothes for her granddaughter (New York’s future junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand). But none of those single aspects define her any more than her facility and toughness in political battle. White has made her credible as both a member of her generation and an example of how superficially women are still judged, and under Scott Elliott’s sensitive direction, Falco embraces all her vulnerability and fortitude, with typically unmannered intelligence and wit.
“I’m just too much for people,” Polly tells Peter at one point, angered by the dispassion of a colleague who happens to be about 30 years younger, and male. “I just…feel things,” she resolves, a moment later. But Polly also thinks, and fights, quite adroitly in both cases. To its great credit, The True insists that we not see these pursuits as contradictory, in women or generally.
The True opened September 20, 2018, at Signature Center and runs through October 28. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
