Interlake Spectator — The Manitoba Theatre Centre’s touring production of “Trying” will be presented Wed., Jan. 19 at 7.30 p.m. in the Gimli High School gymnasium.
The latest play by acclaimed Canadian playwright Joanna McClelland Glass, “Trying” is making its Manitoba debut after attracting large audiences in New York and Chicago. It will also be featured on MTC’s Winnipeg main stage from Feb. 10 to March 5.
The play revolves around Francis Biddle, former U.S. Attorney General and Chief Justice for the Nuremberg war criminal trials, who hires Saskatchewan newly-wed Sarah Schorr as the latest in a long line of Biddle personal secretaries.
At 81, the cantankerous Biddle is realizing that he functions somewhere between lucidity and senility. Despite her employer’s brittle manner and declining health, Sarah is determined to last out the year and help him with his long overdue memoirs.
Together, they try to communicate across the barriers of age and class as one life nears its end and another is just beginning.
“Trying” stars David Fox and Brooke Johnson. Fox will be remembered in Gimli for his performance in “The Drawer Boy”, an earlier MTC touring production. Direction is by Robb Paterson who has performed and directed for all of Winnipeg’s leading theatre companies. including MTC, Rainbow Stage and Prairie Theatre Exchange.
As MTC’s 27th annual touring production, “Trying” is being performed in 16 Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario communities before it reaches Winnipeg. The Gimli show is being sponsored by the local Kiwanis club, the Gimli Rec Authority and Manitoba Culture, Heritage and Tourism.
Tickets, at $10, are available at Gimli’s two pharmacies and Chicken Chef, as well as from any Kiwanis member.

Roger Newman