Sharr White could not have picked a better time to premiere his political play The True with the New Group at off-Broadway’s Pershing Square Signature Center—hot on the heels of a hard-fought New York gubernatorial primary, where a record 1.5 million votes were cast, and just weeks before the most incendiary midterm elections in recent memory. Even though White’s subjects—longtime Albany, N.Y., Mayor Erastus Corning II and his adviser, Dorothea “Polly” Noonan—may not be household names among avid MSNBC viewers, people are starved for intelligent political conversation.
Noonan—played by The Sopranos and Nurse Jackie star Edie Falco with an admirable mix of allure, smarts, and acidity—was a tart-tongued, foul-mouthed political operative; if the Albany Democratic Party was, in fact, a machine, she was its spark plug. She was also, as White puts it, from around 1940 on, the “confidant”—“I get things done,” she says obliquely—of Mayor Corning (Michael McKean, perfectly uptight), which provided fodder for decades and decades of upstate rumormongering.
Not surprisingly, The True, set in 1977, zeroes in on what author Paul Grondahl calls “the deep-seated Albany mythology about the mayor and the Noonan family” in his 2007 biography Mayor Erastus Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma, “a mythology based upon innuendo and surmise, with no definitive conclusion, but a mythology so widespread and long-lived that it cannot be ignored.”
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★★★ review here.]
There’s no denying that Polly is a dramatic character. Colorful doesn’t even begin to describe her dialogue, whether she’s talking about dinner—“Get a f**king spoon out of the fucking drawer and taste the f**king stew,” she tells a deer-caught-in-the-headlights colleague (Austin Caldwell)—or Democrats: “Lyin’ c**ksucker Nixon’s on the teevee lyin’ his c**k off about c**ksucking Watergate!”; “There’s no young blood any more. The whole party’s gettin’ old. And the youth today, they don’t give a s**t—oh, they gave a shit in the ’60s but the s**t they give didn’t flush. Just sat there in the bowl ’til we closed the lid on it.” Her life pretty much demands a biopic. (Fun fact: Her granddaughter is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.) And White definitely has a knack for writing meaty roles for leading ladies. See 2011’s The Other Place, which starred Laurie Metcalf as a neurologist descending into dementia, and 2013’s Chekhovian period piece The Snow Geese, featuring Mary-Louise Parker as widow clinging desperately to the Gilded Age.
But all the did-they-or-didn’t-they buzz surrounding Polly and Erastus gets really old really quickly. It’s where The True starts and pretty much where it finishes more than 100 minutes later. And it’s nowhere near as interesting as Polly’s relationship with her husband, Peter (Peter Scolari, underplaying beautifully). Or as Polly’s sparring with political foes such as would-be party leader Charlie Ryan (John Pankow), who calls her a “land mine”: “Every time you’re in a room, people’re tripping over themselves so they don’t step on you.” Or even as Erastus’ mysterious relationship with his wife, Betty (Tracy Shayne), who makes a brief but brilliant Betty Draper–esque cameo during a particularly heated exchange between Polly and Erastus.
Mostly, we’re left wanting to know much more about Polly herself. On a clandestine car ride with Erastus’ primary challenger Howie Nolan (Glenn Fitzgerald), she gives some unsolicited advice that today’s political machine members—in Albany and elsewhere—would do well to heed: “Never. Knock. A Democrat.… We’re the same blood. And and… And we can draw that blood, as much as we want inside the walls of headquarters. But outside? It makes us all look weak.”
The True opened Sept. 20, 2018, and runs through Oct. 28 at the Pershing Square Signature Center. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
