‘Trying’ is must see theater, now at Gloucester Stage

GLOUCESTER – “Trying” succeeds as must-see theater.The new play at the Gloucester Stage Company has a limited run through Sunday and features a career landmark performance by veteran actor Richard Mawe and a career-making performance by Becky Webber in a two-person play about an aging historic judge and a fictitious young woman who becomes his last clerk.Francis Biddle was the Chief Judge of the Nuremberg Trials, the court created to try former Nazi leaders after World War II. In 1967, at the urging of his offstage wife, Biddle hires a 25-year-old Canadian woman named Sarah Schorr as his last clerk, to help out with finances and the publication of his memoirs in an office above his garage.Ailing, fussy about grammar and his personal routine and never shy about telling his young employee that he is “in the process of leaving,” Biddle pushes Schorr to the limit and beyond, but never loses his fundamental human decency.Schorr first appears completely bundled up, but her single-mindedness carries her through the aging judge?s moods. During the 135-minute play she goes from daughter figure to mother figure and while Biddle?s dry wit evokes laughter her stand-up line in the final scene of Act 1 was the moment that the audience applauded.After Sunday?s performance director Eric Engle said Mawe is “one of my dearest friends in the theater, and directing him in this was one of the most profound privileges of my entire life.”The director and the actor both loved Joanna McClelland Glass?s play, based very imaginatively on her experiences as Biddle?s clerk, and waited until the time was right to do it n and as Engle said, “We struck gold in Becky.”Both actors thoroughly inhabit their roles. Mawe can be glimpsed limping off-stage in the black-out at the end of the first scene and Webber?s energy makes her comfortable in 1960s costumes that she freely admits knowing about “from my mother?s old Barbie doll.”Jenna McFarland Lord?s office set uses warm shades of brown and a single window, whose changing views of sky and trees reflects the character changes.Together they create a glowing theatrical experience that the GSC can be proud of for this season and seasons to come.?Trying” can be seen at the Gloucester Stage Company, 267 East Main St., Gloucester tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m., with matinees Saturday at 3 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. Tickets are $37, $32 for seniors and students. Further information is available at the box office, (978) 281-4433 or www.gloucesterstage.org.