"I am not a crook," Richard Nixon famously declared, and he lied. But he was not a fool. In this production of Frost/Nixon, a play originally made for England's Donmar Warehouse in London, Keith Jochim achieves a brilliantly layered portrait of Nixon, a man far more complicated than most accounts even suggest.
Jochim has played Nixon to acclaim many times, all over the world, in Russell Lee's satirical Nixon's Nixon, a very good play but a thinner picture of our disgraced 37th President. In that two-character piece, Nixon seeks comfort from Henry Kissinger, who hopes to talk him into resigning so that Kissinger can remain in power. In this play by Peter Morgan, based upon "The Conviction of Richard Nixon" by James Reston, Jr., and the actual broadcasts of David Frost's television interviews with Nixon, Jochim has a very different character to play. We begin with Nixon broadcasting his resignation, then follow David Frost's efforts to get a series of interviews broadcast in which he hopes to get what no one has achieved: Nixon's confession of wrongdoing.
The popular understanding of Frost was also misleadingly inadequate. One of the creators of a daringly acidic parody news program on British TV that skewered politicians, Frost had also brought down at least one powerful public figure as an investigative interviewer before Frost became a seemingly celebrity-obsessed talk-show host. His television employment in the United States cancelled and his international following dwindling, Frost seemed to be as desperate for a "comeback" as Nixon. His combative abilities were similarly underrated.
Frost/Nixon sets up these complications from the start. An actor playing Reston, who becomes part of a brain trust hired by Frost to help him understand and strategize the "combat" to expose Nixon, narrates it. Challenged and corrected by more knowledgeable lawyers and political experts, Frost reminds them casually that their livelihood depends upon him, not vice-versa.
We also see Nixon with his advisors, but even more on his own, in startling shifts between easily entertaining with memorable anecdotes, demonstrating impressive familiarity with world-class international concerns and personal insights, charming with dry self-mockery, or self-righteously showing a paranoid fear of criticism and snapping back with deadly sarcasm. The mostly historical recreation of the interviews provides the ultimate drama in which Nixon seems to be "winning" and resuscitating his reputation until the climactic revelations about "Watergate," which elicit as close to a confession as he ever made.
Jeff Talbott is engaging and persuasive as Frost. Jeremy Holm is commandingly stiff-necked and unyielding as Nixon's chief of staff, Jack Brennan. Matt Landers is amusingly close to caricature as dealmaker "Swifty"Lazar. And Celeste Ciulla brings more character to Frost's new girlfriend Caroline Cushing than Morgan's lines for her might suggest. But it is Jochim's Nixon that illuminates and moves us, a president more awful and more able than those who have been leading our country in recent years.
