“I’ve been young but you’ve never been old,” quips the curmudgeonly judge to his ambitious 25-year-old secretary.
Such biting but ultimately tender dialogue typifies an award-winning, two-person play, “Trying,” which is set to open U.S. Thanksgiving weekend, Friday, November 24, at the Bravo Theatre in Ajijic.
Pulling off this unique work, written by a Canadian woman about her own experiences working for U.S. statesman Francis Biddle during the turbulent 1960s, provided unique challenges and opportunities.
One was finding someone to play Sarah, the secretary character. “Because she’s so young, the role is one that not many people in Ajijic could pull off,” said Bernadette Jones, the play’s director.
Things began to come together when Allison Plamondon, and her former acting teacher, Jones, were talking by phone from Plamondon’s home in New York.
As Plamondon explained it, “Bernadette told me she was looking for a role for Roger Larson,” a semi-retired, professional actor whom Jones considers a local gem.
When Plamondon informed Jones that she had already played the young secretary in a New Jersey production of “Trying,” the pieces started to fall into place. Jones snagged Plamondon for the role of Sarah and at the same stroke found a role worthy of Larson: the aristocratic intellectual Biddle, who had been Attorney General under Roosevelt and the chief U.S. judge in the postwar Nuremberg Trials.
Plamondon is set to arrive ten days before the production opens, but has already participated from afar in rehearsals via FaceTime. She emphasized that she is “so excited to come and do the play with Bernadette, my teacher for so many years. I’m counting the days.”
The petite actor (who is also a dancer, choreographer and director) added that as a Canadian living in New York, there are many parallels between her situation and that of the secretary character, who came from Canada to the United States to help Judge Biddle write his memoirs in the final year of his life.
“It’s relevant to me, because like the character, who is based on a real woman – the play’s author Joanna Glass – I’m from the middle of Canada and now living in a sophisticated place that is much more different from my hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, than I expected,” said Plamondon, adding that even her years in Toronto, where she studied under Jones, didn’t completely prepare her for New York.
Director Jones emphasized that, in addition to having two actors who are perfect for their roles, what attracts her to the work is its beautiful and intelligent language.
Plamondon agreed. “Yes, the play is very intelligent but at the end of the day it is also about a special and unlikely relationship between an elderly man and his very strong secretary, who is full of grit and determination and wants to be a serious writer herself.” The character not only respects the judge’s politics, as expressed during a period that included the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but promised Biddle’s wife that she would try to work for him after hearing that he could be a bullying boss who had already scared off more than one secretary.
However, Plamondon emphasized that there is no romance between Biddle and his secretary and none of the disrespect seen in current headlines about sexual harassment in Hollywood. Indeed, in another reference to current politics, director Jones noted that Biddle is actually an admirable character … “unlike what we’re seeing in some politicians today. Biddle had a very strong moral fibre.”