This play's title represents a triple pun. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 100 years ago is the central—albeit offstage—event in the proceedings. The two leading characters—a B-tour actor and a married Tammany politician who is also her producer—are involved in a romantic triangle with his wife, herself offstage for the duration. The third triangle involves the adulterous couple's illegitimate daughter, denied by her father for political reasons and largely ignored by a mother who is usually working out of town.
The 13-year-old girl (nicely played by Michaela McPherson) is on stage, but even her subplot has a once-removed quality. The play's authors, one a professional playwright (Jack Gilhooley) and the other a historian (Daniel Czitrom), seem to have compromised on elements that don't mesh very well; their whole enterprise lacks both drama and passion and involves too many shoe-horned-in distractions.
Neither of the principal characters, Margaret Holland and Big Tim Sullivan, real people who are not well remembered, is likely to engender much audience sympathy upfront, so the authors have injected several side issues into the proceedings. One is name-dropping: More-familiar and engaging characters from the period (roughly 1900–1913) are talked about but never seen. Hey there, "Gene" O'Neill, better known then as the son of the popular actor James O'Neill, who we're told is "researching" his play "The Iceman Cometh" by heavy drinking in Bowery bars. In producer mode, Big Tim dismisses the absent Eugene as a playwright. (What a scene between them it might have been!) Frances Perkins and a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt get talked about in a more favorable light. (A totally unnecessary coda, set in the mid-1930s at Big Tim's gravesite, reminds us that FDR did become president.)
Four public-domain songs of the period, called for in the script, offer awkward cues more than they do any levity. The only character who directly represents the fire is a young female survivor (Ruba Audeh), who delivers a Yiddish-accented monologue at the play's beginning and is not heard from again.
Most egregious in all this talking about instead of talking to are the two characters who serve as aides to Big Tim: the Jewish Izzy Weissman (Dennis Wit) and the transplanted Irish girl Cathleen Murphy (Donna Davis). Director Stephan Morrow has them deliver important exposition about Big Tim and Margaret in ping-pong fashion while standing on either side of the stage, positioned over the seated main characters' heads.
Despite this awkward device, Davis is giving the most credible performance among the cast of six, right down to her charming Irish accent. In the leads, Ashley C. Williams and Joe Gately lack personal chemistry and don't make credible Big Tim's complicity in causing the fire (by his lack of enforcing existing regulations) or Margaret's sudden reformist zeal. Gately does do a good job of showing Big Tim's palsied infirmity in the second act, however.
Presented by Big Tim Productions, in association with the Great American Play Series, as part of Americas Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St., NYC. April 20–May 1. Tue.–Thu., 7:30 p.m.; Fri. and Sat., 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 3:30 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.