Trying (play)

Trying is a drama by Canadian-born playwright Joanna Glass that premiered at Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater on March 29, 2004. The two-act play depicts the final year in the life of Francis Biddle—the United States attorney general under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chief judge of the Nuremberg trials—as it was seen through the eyes of his then twenty-five-year-old assistant, Sarah Schorr. As the young woman relates to the audience, she is merely the latest and coincidentally the last in a long and unsuccessful line of personal secretaries, all of whom have disappointed Biddle in some way. Much of the story revolves around issues of aging and the breakdown of communication over divisions of age and class. The work is derived from Glass's own experiences as Biddle's assistant from 1967 to 1968.