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 “Alice,” the ghost of her traumatized, teenaged self. Alice is mute and only Hick can see her.

Fellow reporter Warner Ragsdale enters the car.  Ragsdale is an 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.

Rags receives an invitation from his fellow journalists to join them in town for an all-male poker game. As he departs, Malvina Thompson (“Tommy”) enters. She is Eleanor Roosevelt’s longtime, personal secretary.

Tommy shares with Hick the shocking secret that Eleanor is threatening to divorce FDR and marry her bodyguard, if FDR wins the White House. She attempts to recruit Hick to cover the First Lady and help mentor her  into the new job, but Hick actually endorses Eleanor’s rebellion. Upset, Tommy exits, and Hick has a showdown with the ghost of her traumatic childhood. 

When Tommy returns, Hick shares a secret about this trauma that breaks the deadlock between her and her ghost, and it also unlocks the key to saving Eleanor from a scandal that would destroy her personally and completely undermine her husband’s effectiveness even before inauguration. 

The play ends as Tommy and Hick both come to a deeper, more compassionate and trauma-informed understanding of Eleanor’s behavior, and Hick agrees to take the job at the White House. Lorena Hickok will eventually help Eleanor become the most powerful woman in American history.

Two males, two females, one teenaged girl

Single set

40 minutes