I made plans several times to catch Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon during its critically-lauded Broadway run a couple of years ago, but, as it happens with some of my best-laid theater plans, they get thwarted by other, more pressing things (hmmm..such as, my real job?!). I had heard and read rave after rave of the play, and of the iconic performances of Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost, so I was quite disappointed that I found the Academy Award-nominated film version with Langella and Sheen re-creating their stage roles to be unexciting and middle-of-the-road (with a pretty unappetizing visual palette of browns and grays, to boot). I must think, then, that Ron Howard, the film’s director, is to blame for the dulling of Morgan’s incisive, exciting, gut-sockingly contemporary writing. For as TimeLine Theatre Company is demonstrating in its dazzling, triumphant, impactful Chicago premiere, directed by Lou Conte in a striking CNN-by-way-of-Sidney-Lumet fashion, Frost/Nixon, the play makes very powerful points about the delusions and self-aggrandizement of public figures, the addictiveness of both fame and notoriety, the role of media in shaping, informing, and distorting perceptions, points that are strongly resonant in our 21st century with the proliferation of latter-day Frosts and Nixons (Katie Couric exposing Sarah Palin’s foreign policy, and overall ignorance in an interview during the 2008 elections comes to mind) brought about by an unforgiving 24/7 news cycle and diverse media platforms, on the one hand, and bolder, more unrestrained actions of public figures, on the other. Timeline’s Frost/Nixon is, simply, one of the best theatrical productions you can see in Chicago this year; and if you’re not spending your money on getting a ticket to see this show, consider yourself shunned from reading this blog.
You can enjoy Frost/Nixon on a purely narrative level, since Morgan writes with so much verve and bite on the preparations leading up to, and the actual conduct of, the 1977 televised interviews which Nixon wanted to use to repair a tarnished image, but which Frost and his team planned to utilize to extract an on-air confession of Nixon’s direct involvement in breaking the law regarding Watergate. Morgan’s scenes are crisply constructed and to the point, with seamless shifts between the self-congratulatory one-upmanship-plotting that Nixon and his Chief of Staff, Jack Brennan, do, and the sweaty, nerve-wracking research that Frost’s team, led by journalist Jim Reston, undertake (while Frost is attending movie premieres). Contey’s masterful, cinematic direction makes these scenes suspenseful and riveting (with the invaluable help of Mike Tutaj’s video projections which establish the mise-en-scene with impressive specificity, despite having the set primarily consist of two chairs, a desk, a crescent-moon platform, and TV monitors). But the play is also a magnificently rendered, always-engaging character study, in which the two protagonists are more similar than different, despite their varying motivations. Both Frost (who, at the beginning of the play, has been banished to Australia after his US network show was cancelled because of low ratings) and Nixon are trying to reclaim that addictive, irreplaceable state of fame and adulation they had once tasted, and which to them represent the achievement of the respect and validation they’ve craved for all their lives. Both are alter-egos of each other – ambitious, driven, cutthroat, motivated by outsider childhoods, fighting for a prize only one of them can win. The theme of the play is exceptionally brought out in Morgan’s stunningly brazen use of dramatic license near the end of the play, when a drunken Nixon makes a call to Frost to subtly concede the interview fight, but also to make the point that he knows what the journalist is made up of and is up to, one fame whore to another.
Writing this good can only bring out the best in actors, and Frost/Nixon has two of the best performances I have seen this year. Terry Hamilton is as brilliant as Frank Langella is in the film – a mammoth, outsized performance that captures Nixon’s insecurities, craftiness, determination, and ruthless ability to tread the grays and white spaces. He is also laceratingly funny; and impressively vulnerable in the video close-up in the final scene where Hamilton exceptionally captures Nixon’s complicated personality – defeated but still defiant, seeking absolution but also convinced he did what he had to do. Hamilton is matched by Andrew Carter’s meticulously crafted, strongly nuanced Frost. Frost, in Carter’s performance, shrewdly plays on how people perceive him on the surface – a good-looking, vivacious party boy – in order to conceal his ability to go for the jugular when his opponent has laid down his or her guard. It is a brilliantly realized performance. The supporting cast is excellent, but props must go to Matthew Brumlow’s intense, focused Reston, David Parkes loyal and canny Brennan, and Beth Lacke’s smoldering Caroline Cushing, Frost’s girlfriend.
I have to come out and say that if you haven’t gone to see a TimeLine production, you’re missing out on some of the best Chicago theater – between Frost/Nixon and last year’s The History Boys, they’ve proven, without a doubt (despite the grumblings of some Chicago theater snobs) that they belong right up there with the Goodman, Steppenwolf, and Victory Gardens in being the go-to theater for the Chicago/regional premieres of the most important plays of our time.
Frost/Nixon is playing at TimeLine Theatre Company, 615 W. Wellington, until October 10,2010. Get your tickets now, before I shun you all permanently!
Tags: TimeLine Theatre Company
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