>>REVIEW
TRYING
Theatre Calgary/Citadel Theatre
Runs until March 19
Max Bell Theatre
(Epcor Centre)
In 1967, young Joanna McClelland Glass from Saskatchewan became personal secretary to 81-year-old Francis Biddle, the legendary American judge who was Frankin D. Roosevelt’s attorney general during the New Deal and a chief juror at the Nuremburg Trials. Trying, McClelland Glass’s most recent play, is a mostly successful recasting of that experience into dramatic form.
The Glass character becomes Sarah Schorr, and Biddle’s first words to her set the tone for the combative first act. "That’s the bathroom in there. If you’re like all the others you’ll go in there to cry." But Sarah, refusing to be cowed, soon assures him that in the unlikely event she does cry, she’ll do it "right here in this chair." "And make me bear witness?" asks a horrified Biddle, who is loath to be "drawn into the morass" of anyone’s problems at this late stage. Biddle has been a witness to some of the most wrenching political crimes in history, of course, and now, in the last year of his life and, by his own admission "somewhere between lucidity and senility," we sympathize with his moral exhaustion. But Sarah isn’t about to excuse him from the obligations of ordinary humanity just yet, and therein lies the simple but compelling conflict of the play.
Judge Biddle is, to use his word, a humdinger of a role, and Frank Moore is obligingly gigantic in the part. Lines like "do not touch me! I may be an invalid, but I am not invalid" might feel distressingly on-the-nose if Moore weren’t able to convey the gleeful self-consciousness of Biddle’s cantankerous wordplay. Moore sells every juicy line and, in the process, shows how one man can be both a patrician crank railing against practitioners of the split infinitive and a large-spirited Democrat for whom the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans is among the greatest shames of history.
As Sarah, Vanessa Holmes does a good job with a much less enviable role. Though occasionally she resorts to hoary Canadian-girl-makes-good mannerisms, for the most part she plays off Moore’s grandiloquent theatrics with skilled understatement and ironic poise. The point of this character is clearly that she has the spine to stand up to Biddle and to make him respect her – and her prairie populism – in the process. But this is a "development" that’s telegraphed from the start, so it’s unsurprising that we find Sarah’s pluck a little boring. It’s in Sarah’s rare moments of "weakness" that Holmes’s acting really shines.
Both performers do a superb job of conveying the sheer love of language shared by the characters and the play itself. At several points, the conflict pauses while Biddle and Sarah swap quotes from their favourite poems – usually a sure way to kill a play. But in this case, the discussion feels earned: both are passionately bookish and inordinately fond of words. And far from alienating the audience, the quotations are chosen judiciously, underlining certain points in ways that could feel ham-fisted in straight dialogue.
The third star of the show is the Judge’s office. Located above his garage, it’s a roomy A-frame attic with ancient, treacherous heaters and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. David Boechler’s set design and Robert Thomson’s lighting showcase the lovely apartness of the place, reflected in everything from the haunting play of morning light through the space to its intense, bookish masculinity (there are at least 10 different shades of brown). The judge must trek to it across the lawn each morning and then make the arduous climb up the stairs. The laboured thumps of these unseen climbs are truly painful to listen to, and Sarah’s springy, energetic ascents provide a poignant counterpoint. Later, the tables are turned, and it’s a many-months-pregnant Sarah whose steps thunder-clomp up. Dennis Garnhum’s nuanced direction is rich in such details, highlighting the kinship between the characters without beating us over the head.
There are some weaknesses in the script, including a nearly conflict-free second act, an overly sentimental ending that feels tacked-on, and a reiteration of the word "trying" that’s more cutesy than profound. Overall, however, McClelland Glass does straightforward justice to some very rich material, and this production – anchored by Moore’s powerhouse performance – serves it well indeed. |
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