Fritz Weaver does not limp. His hand isn't cramped into an arthritic claw, either. This may surprise you after seeing Trying, in which Weaver so convincingly embodies 81-year-old Francis Biddle that it becomes one of those performances where an actor is not just portraying a character―he is that character.
As Biddle, who was attorney general during FDR's last term and a judge at the Nuremberg trials, Weaver has to be both crotchety and tender, a fuddy-duddy and a progressive thinker. Playwright Joanna McClelland Glass based Trying on her tenure as Biddle's secretary during the last year of his life. She found Weaver for the role through the agent they shared, though Weaver recalls, "She had in mind a different kind of looking person, because his appearance is not at all like mine." Nonetheless, Weaver looks the part of this Main Line Philadelphian, who was descended from English colonists and educated at Groton and Harvard.
Weaver has played many erudite, patrician types in his career, which began with The White Devil off-Broadway in 1954. He was nominated for a Tony for his 1955 Broadway debut in The Chalk Garden and won in 1970 for Child's Play, Robert Marasco's mystery set in a Catholic boys school. His television guest roles range from Studio One to Frasier, and he's appeared in more than 50 feature and made-for-TV movies. On stage, he's done Ibsen, O'Neill, Miller, Anouilh, Ayckbourn, Lanford Wilson, Lerner & Loewe, even Mel Brooks (the 1962 musical All American), and has been a premier American interpreter of Shakespeare.
And now, at age 78, Weaver is giving "the performance of a lifetime," as the Chicago Sun-Times raved when Trying originated in Chicago earlier this year. Replicating Biddle's physical ailments is only one aspect in his complex portrayal of a complex man. Though Biddle had become a Democrat out of concern for others' suffering during the Depression, he still cherished the mores of the privileged world in which he was raised. In the play, set in 1967-68, he disparages youth, technology, Betty Friedan and other harbingers of change, and groundlessly scolds his 25-year-old secretary, Sarah (played by Kati Brazda). Weaver's Biddle is no unremittent tyrant, though. There is much poignance as he struggles with failing health and memory and loses himself in sorrow over the deaths of his father and young son. And in moments of lucidity, he recites poetry and dictates his memoirs with eloquent conviction, as in the scene where he renounces his approval of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II: "Never again will I trust that mystic cliche, military necessity."
In an interview in his dressing room at the Promenade Theatre, Weaver spoke with BWW about the Biddle role and his half-century journey in theater and film.
How does it feel for the "performance of a lifetime" to come along 50 years into your career?
It's a blessing. I've played a lot of pretty big roles, but most actors when they get to my years are content to play grandpas and stuffy uncles. This is just a perfect thing to be doing at this age because I can use the age.
Do you feel more of an affinity with Judge Biddle than other characters you've portrayed?
Yes, I would have to say that was true. A lot of his qualities sit rather naturally on me, whereas some of the other things I've done it was an effort to make yourself into the other person, to find those areas in your person which are similar. I didn't have to look too hard this time.
How much do you really have in common with Judge Biddle?
It's difficult for me to put it into words because I'm afraid of demystifying it, but I would say there are quite a few [similarities between us]. Testiness, with age. He's very volatile in some ways. My mother is Italian and volatile, so maybe I have a little of the...rages of his. He's, as Joanna said, a "vigilant grammarian." I tend to be that way too; I go around correcting people's split infinitives. He has a powerful legal mind, and I don't have that, but his wife's influence on him brought him into the humanities.
