TRYING, now at the Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado, is one of those rueful, wintry dramas of the great man living out his last days. The end is inevitable; the only question is will he go with gallantry, fear, defiance, resignation or what?

Judge Francis Beverley Biddle, a Yankee patrician who served as Franklin Roosevelt’s attorney general during World War II, is mostly peeved at the problem and frustrated with his rapidly diminishing assets. He has memoirs to finish, historians to set straight and grammar to police. But no matter how doggedly he enforces a strict daily routine, the sands are slipping away.

This is a man whose ancestor bought a big chunk of Pennsylvania in 1681. Whose father regularly lunched with Benjamin Franklin’s elderly great-granddaughter. He prepped a Groton, earned degrees from Harvard cum laude, fled the Republican Party in horror at the sufferings of the poor in the Depression and presided over the Nazi war-crimes trials in postwar Nuremberg. And now he’s having trouble balancing his checkbook. All the B’s in his address book are crossed out as diseased.

Each day, however, he climbs the stairs of his study, adjusts the stoves just so and tries to catch up with work. That’s why the second character of Joanna McClelland Glass’s play enters up those stairs. She’s the latest stenographer hired by Biddle’s wife to help him cope. The others have quit, finding his dotage more tiresome than touching. The new girl is just 25, fresh from the plains of Canada and titillated by the challenge.

One of Judge Biddle’s many rules is that he refuses to become involved to the slightest degree in his secretaries’ personal lives. He hasn’t the time for distractions and certainly no interest in the details.

Well power to him, say I, from the vantage of not quite as many years and not nearly the life achievement. I agree completely, even though I know he’s going to bend that rule> So, I suspect, does he. There are no dams on the river of life. The little soul will inevitably affect the big, just as an asteroid causes the slightest wobble even in the orbit of great Jupiter.

And to learn from the program notes that the author herself served as secretary to Judge Biddle in his last months of life seals it. There WILL be sentiment, it WILL involve the stenographer’s private life and both parties WILL grow and change as a result.

I’m proud to report, however, that it all works out rather well. Kerry Meads has directed the play with great sensitivity and unobtrusive polish. Michael McKeon has provided a dandy book-choked study. And the two actors are excellent, especially Doug Waldo as the melancholy elder.

The secretary is a role obviously autobiographical, with its careful balance of deference and spunk. Kelsey Venter plays it straight ahead, admirably resisting all temptations to deepen the complexity and thus distort the relationship of the two characters.

Biddle gets all the good stuff, including the stiff humor of the piece. The role is written with fond indulgence but Waldo will have none of that. He really does bully the girl. He really is rude. And he deals no better with the frustrations of failing faculties than do any of us. But Waldo leaves the feeling that, while he may repeat himself tediously, what he’s saying is really worth hearing. Waldo even manages pain – both in body and in memory – plausibly. “I have you at a disadvantage,” the actor says with honed emphasis. “I have been young but you have never been old.”

The most bothersome part of the play is the realization that, outside the study, 1967 is happening. Vietnam is a cancer. A generation is in rebellion. There are assassinations. Yet this girl’s favorite poets are Edna St. Vincent Millay and e.e. cummings. Where, we must wonder, are Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti? Or at least the Beatles?

The answer probably is that what’s wanted here is more of a twilight elegy that a slice of history. A journey is ending and final touches are being made on a legacy. The process is not pretty but it does allow for dignity and even satisfaction with a job well done.

Your elderly friends and family will adore this show. It’s geezer porn.

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