For those of us of a certain age, it’s flabbergasting to think that it’s been more than 30 years since Nixon resigned. But that cataclysmic event is history, and dim history at that for many. Which makes TimeLine Theatre's latest offering all the more important. Like Ozymandias, yesterday’s kings, king-makers and breakers are inevitably reduced to easily overlooked ruins. TimeLine has carved out a niche excavating such rubble, and with Frost/Nixon, TimeLine it does that with mostly admirable results.
Frost/Nixon is problematic, but it’s a searingly vivid slice of history nonetheless and director Louis Contey illuminates it well. Peter Morgan’s drama isn’t pocked with active explosions. It’s based on a series of interviews, most of which – in real life - were a long, slow slog. For all but the final hour or so of David Frost’s conversations with Richard Nixon, the former president is allowed to natter on in endless, indulgent self-praise, putting his own ludicrous spin on his role in the Viet Nam conflict and the Watergate break-in. Until nearly the end, there’s not much inherent drama to the interviews.
Go back and watch the actual Frost/Nixon video and you realize they’re about seven-eighths Nixon painting himself as a misunderstood hero, complete with self-aggrandizing flourishes as he strolls down a memory lane coated in rosy denial. It’s work getting to the final, explosive payoff when Frost finally pinned his quarry with the hard, relentless facts of undeniable corruption.
In dramatizing all this, Morgan created a talky piece that seems to stretch in order to maintain a sense of dramatic tension in the 90 minutes leading up to that climactic denouement. Here, there that problem is compounded by Terry Hamilton’s less than fully-fleshed out Nixon. This is Tricky Dick by way of vocal tics and physical mannerisms; the soul of the man remains a cipher. The turbulent darkness historians have written so much about is largely absent.
That absence is felt most acutely after Nixon’s chief of staff Jack Brennan (David Parkes) abruptly stops the interview when it becomes clear Nixon is on the rails. Frost’s colleagues explode at the interference. Don’t worry, Frost tells them, Nixon is ready to surrender. The ex-president, Frost says quietly, wants the interviewer to bring him down. But in Hamilton’s performance, we don’t see that desire. Insinuations of that incredibly complex hubris are muted so much as to be indistinguishable.
In the end, Andrew Carter’s Frost becomes the show’s center and driving force. Carter captures all of Frost’s contradictions - the suave sophisticate driven by ambition and insecurity, a man who became an emblem of blow-dried, superficial 1970s cool without ever shedding the inwardly, indelibly wounded interior of a boy from the wrong side of the tracks.
Contey’s supporting cast is also notable in its richness. Matthew Brumlow is a powder-keg of educated fury as outspoken Nixon critic Jim Reston, while as journalist Bob Zelnick, off-Loop veteran Don Bender simmers with the sort of raging frustration only the middle-aged are capable of.
Costume designer Alex Wren Meadows has outfitted the cast in a marvelously authentic array of wide-lapel suits and Quiana-like dresses, while scenic designer Keith Pitts canny, circular set evokes the Watergate Hotel while serving as Frost’s talk show lounge.
Frost/Nixon continues through Oct. 10 at TimeLine Theatre, 615 W. Wellington, Chicago. For ticket information, click here or call 773/281-8463.
For more reviews of TimeLine productions, click here (The Farnsworth Invention) here (History Boys), here (A House With No Walls), here (When She Danced), here (Tesla's Letters), or here (Not Enough Air).
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