Trying

By Joanna McClelland Glass

Drama / lm 1f / InteriorTrying is a two-character play based on the author's experience during1967-1968 when she worked for Francis Biddle at his home in Washington D.C. Judge Biddle had been Attorney General of the United States underFranklin Roosevelt. After the war President Truman named him Chief Judgeof the American Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The play is about a youngCanadian girl and an old Philadelphia aristocrat "trying" to understandeach other in what Biddle knows is the

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0573662819
• ISBN13: 9780573662812
• Release Date: July 2008
• Publisher: Concord Theatricals
• Length: 84 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

intellectual gluttons for punishment

I saw a production of "Trying" by Joanna McClelland Glass at the Park Square Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on Tuesday night, September 18, 2007. Featuring an old actor and a young woman who attempts to be the secretary for an old man who expects to die in a year at the age of 82, the high points of the play include some dementia induced by different points of view which are intellectual enough to include the observation, "Harvard was already old school when Yale was a young pup." The low point was a daily reflection on the old man's inability to stop the United States from interring the Japanese during World War II. The Secretary of War claimed some "military necessity" required that certain people be removed from the West Coast to prevent the repetition of events like Pearl Harbor, when Japanese bombers knew where their targets were on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941. There were a few comments about the pathology of Nazis that faced judgment at Nuremburg. Was it Hess who tried to commit suicide? Hitler and Himmler probably did it right. Francis Biddle has a line in his address book through the names of people who are already dead, and the play probably starts at the point where all the "B"s are gone.