31 July 2010: Glass, Trying

Gloucester Stage. Richard Mawe as the Judge, Becky Webber as the young secretary

A two-character play by Joanna McClelland Glass about Francis Biddle, primary American judge at the Nuremburg trials after World War II, who in old age is writing his memoirs as he is dying, and who frightens away secretary after secretary until a more stalwart young woman, Sarah, shows up, finds him trying, but remains anyway. Best new play of 2004, and very well acted, though the ending, in which the Judge doesn’t show up one morning and, we discover, has died overnight, is unavoidably anti-climactic. It’s a competent, interesting play — but if it was the best new play of 2004, that doesn’t say very much about the quality of the new drama.