While in rehearsals recently for the latest cross-country tour of my and Rob Barron’s Theatreworks/USA version of "The Phantom of the Opera", I had occasion to step into the TW/USA offices a floor above Chelsea Rehearsal Studios. (The proximity is no coincidence: TW/USA own and operates Chelsea.) I paused by the desk of a colleague who works there and saw that he had a Playbill of "Trying" on his desk.
I’m supposed to be an impartial critic, and am, for the most part…but I’m prey to impulsive dish, same as most anyone, so indulged the compulsion to ask, "How did you like it?"
"Oh, it was okay."
"Not better than okay? It was a bigass hit in Chicago last season."
"Yeah, well…"
"What do you mean?"
"It wasn’t really surprising. She comes to work for him, he’s a curmudgeon, she finds the strength to stand up to him, they exchange confessions, he dies, and she’s the better for having known him."
"Ah, well, if you put it like that…"
I was a bit annoyed that my colleague had delivered a massive spoiler with his appraisal, but when I attended the play, I realized that he was right about no story surprises. The arrival of each plot point described is evident right from the start. To wit:
The two-character play is the author, Joanna McClelland Glass’s, reminiscence of a six month period in 1967, during which she was secretary to the internationally known Francis Biddle (Fritz Weaver), Attorney General under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Chief Judge of the Nuremberg trials. To crib from a press release synopsis, he’s 81 years old and elegant, but sharply cantankerous as he tries to put his life in order, struggling with the inevitability of his age and failing health— and Sarah Schorr (the McClelland stand-in, played by Kati Brazda) the new 25 year old secretary his wife has forced upon him.
As you can see, there’s simply no other dramatic progression possible, because that defines the point of the exercise. Like "Tuesdays with Morrie" and various other two character dances drawn from real life in which old and young learn from each other, "Trying" satisfies the needs of a genre.
So the question is not really how predictable it is. That’s built in.
The question is how much the playwright can make you care about the characters doing the expected dance. How much she makes you root for them to fulfill the formula…because, as my friend asserted, they become more complete, fuller beings for the experience.
I’m pleased to say, Ms. Glass does well by the formula, and if you’re not as cynical about its built-in manipulations, you may find it pleasing. Even somewhat touching.
Among the things that sustains such a formula is how distinctly and idiosyncratically the characters are drawn, so that even if external revelations don’t surprise us, internal ones do. The details of Sarah’s Canadian background and relationship with her father tell us much about the strength her shyness hides. And for all Judge Biddle’s relentless insistence upon scrupulously proper English grammar and usage his invented colloquialisms (when he says his wife gave him a severe "tune up," he means she told him off) and modifications ("pisadeared" for "disappeared," which is established and goes by refreshingly without comment) help paint a portrait of a man who, in spite of himself, is as full of contradictions as anyone. Add to Ms. Glass’s stew very actable dialogue and a sense of how to develop all this quietly, sans melodrama, and "Trying"’s status as a Chicago hit makes a good deal more sense than in the abstract.
Finally, there is the cast, under the sensitive direction of Sandy Shinner. As Sarah, Kati Brazda is not a traditional choice, her feature capable of seeming plain, her figure not a slim one, her chin-length hair straight, unstyled and bland. But she is thus the deceptively nondescript canvas upon which ever-deepening humanity is etched. Working (of course) in reverse, the venerable Fritz Weaver presents at first a hard, implacable shell that softens and yields—grudgingly, for the most part, but at times with a childlike need for guidance—to show that he too is a more complex package than he first appears.
All this is not to claim that "Trying" reinvents the wheel. It is, as my friend asserted, a familiar ride. But there are those rides we take vfor the comforting reassurance, aren’t there…?