As written here, and as played so fiercely by Ms. Falco, Polly invites but also suffers from those inequities. She is so hard driving that she often zooms straight off cliffs of propriety, then keeps going on pure momentum and somehow lands safely on the other side. Whether arm-twisting the competition or lighting a fire under the patrician Corning, she is the model of the cynically uncynical type who makes no distinction between dirty politics and true belief.
Whenever Ms. Falco is bringing these themes to the fore, especially in her scenes with rival politicians played by Mr. Fitzgerald and John Pankow, “The True” is riveting. It even manages a plausible eulogy for the lost merits of the old-style machine — in which, as Polly says, committeemen knew what every local wife was having for dinner “because we were eating it with her.” Mystery pensions and patronage jobs were not graft but a means of caring for widows and out-of-work neighbors.
But in Polly’s more domestic scenes, with Peter and Corning, the play sometimes bogs down. (Though it’s just 105 minutes, it feels longer.) Mr. White wants to have it both ways with this ménage, not willing to step too far beyond the record yet using it to gin up tension all the same. That tension is somewhat bogus: Early on, Corning announces that he must cut off ties with Polly for reasons he will not specify. After much talk, the reasons emerge and are neither surprising nor consequential.
Under the snappy direction of Scott Elliott, the actors pull this off — and, in one scene, an unexpected character even brings down the house with a stupendous cameo appearance. But the result is something of a stalemate: arguable as history, patchy as drama.
I’m not sure there was any way around this problem. Mr. White, who writes for “The Affair” on Showtime, and whose two Broadway plays were a success (“The Other Place”) and a disaster (“The Snow Geese”), might have done better to break entirely free of fact so he could invent a much more dramatic story. And yet, the lack of drama — or rather the subduction of it — may be what’s most interesting here.
It is, after all, Polly who has the gift — the gift we associate with certain leaders — of connecting to the emotion beneath the policy and the people behind the vote. (“A machine doesn’t care,” she says. “A machine doesn’t have heart.”) And it’s she who has the harder job, like Ginger Rogers, of doing everything the men do but backward and in heels.
What makes “The True” worth its longueurs is the chance to see Ms. Falco bite into the unfairness of all that, but also the excitement. Love or legislation, it’s all back-room politics.
