In 2 shows, key players held to account
The Triangle Factory Fire Project
New York Daily News
Howard Kissell
May 28, 2004
Political reality is certainly a subject our theater should deal with more often ? and more intelligently ? than it does. Examples of the strengths and pitfalls of using it are on view a few doors from each other on Theater Row.
At the Clurman, 410 W. 42nd, is "The Triangle Factory Fire Project," conceived and directed by Scott Alan Evans, in which a cast of nine plays dozens of men and women involved with one of the greatest tragedies in New York history.
About 90% of the script, by Christopher Piehler, is drawn from first-person accounts of the fire that killed nearly 150 people in 25 minutes on a bitter March day in 1911.
The first act of "Fire," performed by members of TACT (The Actors Company Theatre) conveys the grisly details of the fire, much of which hinged on the fact that one of the doors that might have allowed the largely immigrant women who worked on the ninth floor of the factory to escape, was locked.
The second and far more compelling act concerns the trial in which the greedy owners, through the tactics of a pre-World War I Alan Dershowitz type, escape the consequences of their treatment of their workers.
The script makes clear it was also the social circumstances of the trial that made the "not guilty" verdict inevitable.
Scott Schafer and Kyle Faber, as the lawyers; Nora Chester, as a nervous witness, and Francesca di Mauro as the mother of one of the victims are all particularly strong.
Unlike "Fire," which is based on reality, Jon Robin Baitz's "Chinese Friends," at Playwrights Horizons, 420 W. 42nd St., is set 30 years hence, when the children of three politicos from our era confront the sole survivor of that epoch about his sinister machinations.
The title refers to a game in which the power of the pieces on the board can be radically altered in a single move.
Even if the writing reflected political savvy (which it doesn't), the need to justify such a title gives the action an artificiality that makes it virtually impossible for us to care about the complicated, sometimes violent things that happen.
Even the estimable Peter Strauss, as, quite literally, the elder statesman, finds himself doing more posturing than acting. The script doesn't give him many options.