DELIVERED WITH FIRE
The Triangle Factory Fire Project
New York Post
By Donald Lyons
May 20, 2004
On March 25, 1911, fire ripped through the top three floors of the Asch building, at Washington Place and Greene Street.
The site was home to a manufacturing concern, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, which turned out what was then a chic piece of feminine apparel, the triangle-shaped shirtwaist. By day?s end, 146 workers ? nearly all of them young female immigrants ? were dead.
Now playwright Christopher Piehler, in collaboration with The Actors Company Theatre, has written about this horrific event in ?The Triangle Factory Fire Project.?
Electrically directed by Scott Alan Evans and dynamically acted by the whole company, it is one of the theater events of the season.
In the sly style of Moises Kaufman?s plays about Oscar Wilde and Matthew Shepard (?Gross Indecendy,? ?The Laramie Project?), it seems at first a simple assembly of witnesses ? but it winds up reducing you to tears.
At first, we get the feel of the times: A newspaper reporter gives his perspective; labor leader Samuel Gompers addresses workers at Cooper Union; a suffragist calls for strike on grounds of overcrowding and underpaying.
Then comes the fire. Here, recounted in simple but wrenching narratives, we learn how the factory workers ran for the doors, only to find them locked.
We also hear of a professor at nearby NYU, who helped one factory worker down the stairs but was mainly concerned about rescuing the books in an adjacent library.
The fire hoses reached only to the sixth floor ? and some of the young women on the burning floors jumped. The firefighters who were forced to ax their way in found piles of corpses.
It?s hard not to feel the parallels between this and 9/11, the last time New York City was shocked to its core by a tragedy in a tall building.
The later part of the play involves mainly the trial of the factory owners on grounds of criminal negligence. It was then Christmas in New York, but the streets were full of people looking for justice, like Bertha Stewart, mother of Margaret, lost in the fire.
We hear a fireman testify that he found the doors locked and had to break through them. In turn, while the factory owners admitted they were savagely vigilant against theft by the workers, they claimed the keys were left in the locks all along.
Nine superb actors play many roles each. Particularly memorable are Nora Chester as lace-cutter Kate, Francesca DiMauro as the distraught mother, Jamie Bennett as the journalist, Kyle Fabel as the DA and especially Scott Schafer as the loathsome lawyer for the defense.
Everyone involved does a brilliant job in this searing play, which reminds us why theater exists.