Trying

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Trying is a poignant, poetic and powerful story about a relationship between Francis Biddle, Attorney General under Roosevelt and Chief Judge at the Nuremburg trials; and Sarah, a tenacious 25-year-old woman from the Canadian plains, one of a string of secretaries Biddle's wife has hired to help him put his affairs in order at the end of his long an illustrious career. Biddle, 81, is in poor health, proud and cantankerous as he begins to confront his own mortality. Sarah, however, is also headstrong, and from her early life on the prairie has developed a strength and wisdom beyond her years. Despite the difference in ideologies and age, the two forge a friendship. The play is autobiographical in nature and is written by Joanna McClelland Glass, who worked for Biddle in the late 60s.

Scion of an old Philadelphia Mainline family (his ancestor William Biddle bought land directly from William Penn and he was a distant relative of James Madison), the real Francis Biddle was a complicated man. A Harvard graduate and a successful attorney, he threw off the expectations of his upbringing and made it his life's work to stand up for the downtrodden and fight for what is right. And yet, despite his sense of social justice and the great good he achieved in his lifetime (he was part of the tribunal that convicted Hermann Goering and Rudolph Hess), he was not without contradictions. It was Biddle's duty during World War II to order the FBI to round up Japanese-born American citizens and take them to interment camps, a fact that continued to haunt him throughout his life. In a letter to Stanford Professor Shiko Furukawa, he later wrote, "Never again will I trust that mystic cliché' 'military necessity.'