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Director Cameron Watson CAST
Sarah Schorr Act I Scene 1: November, 1967 Act II Scene 1: Early January, 1968
From the
Playwright Speak,
Memory By Joanna McClelland Glass In
the autumn of 1967, in Washington, D.C., I began work as a secretary
to Francis Biddle. He was 81 at the time. He had been Attorney General
under Franklin Roosevelt, 1941-1945. In 1946, Harry Truman appointed
him to be Chief American Judge of the International Military Tribunal
at the Nuremberg Trials. On my first day of employment he told me,
quite emphatically, that he was certain he was in his final year of
life. He died in October of 1968. We worked in an office that was located atop a garage, an aerie that had once been a hayloft. The garage was approximately 150 feet across the yard from the Judge and Mrs. Biddle's Georgetown house. The trek from the house to the garage was a chore for him; the ensuing climb of a dozen stairs left him winded. And although his physical discomfort angered him, he reserved his deepest rage for the way in which his once-brilliant mind now betrayed him. He fluctuated between "lucidity and senility," as he says in my play. Occasionally he confused me with a secretary who had started a fire in the office after leaving the gas heaters on. Always a vigilant grammarian, occasionally he resorted to tirades against my use of split infinitives. Occasionally he drove me to tears, but I knew that I was witnessing a man of great intellectual stature doing battle, fiercely, with his mortality. And as our sometimes comical, sometimes argumentative days together passed, my fondness for him grew. My first awkward stab at playwriting was Santacqua, produced
in
December of 1969 at Herbert Berghof's Playwright's Unit on Bank Street
in Greenwich Village. A year later I wrote the first version of Trying,
in the form of a one-act play. I sent it to Herbert, requesting an
opinion. He replied enthusiastically and insisted that I send the play
to his old friend, Alfred Lunt. And so it happened, in April of 1971,
that the then 78-year-old actor called me from "Ten Chimneys," his
Wisconsin farm. It was an unusually warm spring day in Detroit. I was
mixing a pitcher of Kool Aid and was surrounded by, and overwhelmed by,
my three noisy children when the phone rang. (I had three kids in two
years, due to twins.) Mr. Lunt said that he found the contradictions in
Biddle--the "radical patrician" aspects of him--fascinating, and went
on to say that he would very much like to play the part. And then,
sadly, he said, "But I'm afraid I can't play anymore because I'm going
blind, and I bump into things." I put the play away but the image of
Biddle fending off the Grim Reaper lingered with me across almost four
decades. Finally, I went back to the 45-minute one-act play and found that I had recorded there what I consider to be the essentials of the Judge's final year. He was, much of the time, utterly frustrated with the naiveté of my youthful convictions and pronouncements. He was frequently in a state of aggravation over articles, journals and files that had been destroyed in the fire. He was obsessed with the two deaths that forever changed his life. (His father had died when Judge Biddle was only six years old, and one of his sons, Garrison Chapin Biddle, had died when only seven years old.) And he deeply regretted, in his mind, his heart and all of his written correspondence, his role as Attorney General during the internment of 125,000 Japanese-American citizens during World War II. It is on these basic essentials that I strove to construct the full-length, two-hour play now playing at The Colony. Special Thanks Derek
Bjornson, Brad Brown, Chriss Garr, Sharon Estep - Burbank Airport
Marriott, |
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