It’s the afternoon of September 25, 1932, and Franklin Roosevelt is campaigning for the Presidency on a 9000-mile, whistlestop tour across the United States. His train is on a sidetrack in an Arizona depot, and the members of the press corps, given the day off, have headed into town.

Lorena Hickok (“Hick”), the only woman in the New York bureau of the Associated Press, is nursing a glass of  bootleg whiskey in the abandoned press car.  She is being shadowed by the ghost of her traumatized, teenaged self.

The ghost hides when fellow reporter Warner Ragsdale enters the car.  Ragsdale is the Associated Press White House correspondent. A middle-class, Southern, college graduate, “Rags” is agitated by the presence of Hick, a working-class and gender non-conforming lesbian who has had to fight her way into an all-male profession. The two spar over the rise of Hitler in Germany, as well as over controversial coverage of the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Hick’s subject position gives her a journalistic advantage over Ragsdale, who sees the news as the elite wish it to be seen.

Rags receives an invitation from his fellow journalists to join them in town for a male-only poker game. As he departs, Hick’s ghost makes a brief appearance, followed by the entrance of Malvina Thompson (“Tommy”),  who is Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal secretary.

Tommy shares with Hick the shocking secret that Eleanor has made a credible threat to divorce FDR if he wins the election and to marry her bodyguard. Tommy begs Hick to accept an assignment to cover the First Lady, in order to mentor her into acceptance of her new role. Hick, who fought for years to get off the women’s pages, is understandably fierce in her rejection.

As Tommy frames Eleanor’s behavior as the result of her loveless and lonesome childhood, Hick’s ghost becomes increasingly agitated.  When Hick reveals the violence and sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, the ghost attacks her. Tommy’s compassionate intervention marks a turning point in Hick’s career and also in the fate of the nation, as Eleanor will go on to redefine what is possible for a First Lady, becoming the most powerful woman in the world.

One male, two females, one teenaged girl (one male walk-on)

Single set

40 minutes