‘Trying’ Review: Final Verdict
Joanna McClelland Glass based the bioplay on her own experience as the last secretary to Francis Biddle, who had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s attorney general and a judge at Nuremberg.
By Terry Teachout April 8, 2021
The Wall Street Journal
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North Coast Repertory Theatre, which presented superior webcast productions of “An Iliad” and “Same Time, Next Year” in 2020, is now offering yet another extremely watchable two-hander. Joanna McClelland Glass’s “Trying,” staged by David Ellenstein, the company’s artistic director, is a bioplay about Francis Biddle (played by James Sutorius), a bred-in-the-bone Philadelphia Republican who had a midlife conversion and switched parties to become Franklin Roosevelt’s attorney general (in which capacity he unsuccessfully opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II) and, later, to serve as a judge at the Nuremberg war-crime trials. First produced in Chicago in 2004, “Trying” has since been taken up by drama companies throughout America and is now one of the most frequently produced two-hand bioplays to come along in years.
Ms. Glass served as Biddle’s last secretary after he retired, and her play shows what he was like in the months prior to his death in 1968, when old age (he was 81), fast-declining health and chronic arthritic pain had joined forces with his natural impatience to turn him into what Sarah (Emily Goss), the playwright’s 25-year-old fictional alter ego, rightly describes as “a hectoring, domineering old man,” a grammar-correcting martinet who wants everything around him to be just so and is prepared to carry on until he gets his way.
You won’t be even slightly surprised to learn that the Biddle of “Trying” overcomes his irascibility and becomes a quasi-father figure to Sarah—it’s that kind of play—and I found “Trying” superficial when I reviewed it off Broadway 17 years ago. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself deeply moved this time around by Ms. Glass’s portrayal of the growing friendship between Biddle and Sarah. This is partly because the acting and production are so very good, but mainly, I suspect, because time and experience have given me a greater appreciation of the hurtful effect of prolonged suffering on human personality. Whatever the reason, I was much taken with North Coast Rep’s webcast version of “Trying.” It’s definitely worth your time.
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Photo credit: Aaron Rumley
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