Like a lot of people, I spent the weekend before the Inauguration Day thinking about what it means for a president to commit crimes while in office. And what it means if he isn’t held accountable afterwards. Worse still, what if he’s not only above the law, but finds a way to make money from his crimes?
But unlike most of the people thinking about those things, I enjoyed part of my weekend.
Iowa City Community Theater (ICCT) premiered its production of Frost/Nixon on Friday night at The James Theater. The play by Peter Morgan — a British playwright probably best-known to Americans as the creator of The Crown — was first staged in London in 2006. It moved to Broadway the following year, and in 2008, Ron Howard directed a film based on the play.
Frost/Nixon dramatizes the events around David Frost’s famous four-part television interview with Richard Nixon in 1977, just three years after Nixon resigned the presidency to avoid being impeached and removed from office for the constellation of crimes known as Watergate. At the time, Frost, a British talkshow host who had been an important pop-culture figure from the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, was becoming increasingly irrelevant. Nixon was quietly working to rehabilitate his image, as he’d successfully done several times over the course of his career, convincing people, and especially the media, to ignore what they already knew about him.
Although inspired by real events, using characters drawn from real life and direct quotes from the actual interviews, Morgan’s play is a work of dramatic imagination. It’s no more a documentary of David Frost’s encounter with Richard Nixon than John Adam’s opera Nixon in China is a primer on U.S.-Sino relations.
“On the face of it, the play certainly has a focus on what we would consider political misdeeds,” director Barry Schreier told Little Village. “But at the heart of the play, it’s really about humility and contrition. What happens when people are humble and contrite, and what happens when they are not.”
“That’s why we saw a universal quality in it,” he added.
Still, the play is suffused with politics, as is the timing of the ICCT production. Staging Frost/Nixon the weekend before and the weekend after the presidential inauguration was a deliberate choice. ICCT announced the plays for its 2024-25 season in February 2024, which is so long ago that Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee and there was still a chance Donald Trump might be put on trial for crimes committed when he tried to subvert the 2020 presidential election.
Of course, as 2024 unfolded… well, if you’re reading Little Village, you already know what a twisted path events followed.
“One of the things we have been thoughtful about with the show is that we are trying not to have it be a reaction to or a response to anything that’s going on currently,” Schreier explained.
The play opens with Frost, eager to return to prominence, trying to secure Nixon’s first TV interview since resigning. Nixon is interested because Frost is offering a lot of money. Plus, Nixon is convinced Frost is a lightweight he will be able to overwhelm in the interviews.
Both are counting on the power of television to lead to their redemption. Nixon is eager to establish he is not a crook, despite the mountain of evidence that he is. But he knows memories are short, and good TV clips can be repeated endlessly. Frost is focused on his return to the top of one of the “delirious professions,” where the “raw material is the opinion others have of you,” as the poet Paul Valéry put it. Of course, he also wants the extravagant lifestyle that would come with his return. Eventually, Frost comes to the uncomfortable realization that unless he changes, he could be the pushover Nixon expects and his big TV moment could be a career-ending disaster.
All this might make the play sound like some sort of a ponderous PBS special, but nothing could be further from the truth. It moves at a brisk pace, and has a surprising amount of humor throughout. The playwright (and unintentionally, the real Frost and Nixon) provided the play’s funny lines, but it’s to the credit of the director and the performers that those lines never seem forced and don’t trivialize the play’s bigger themes.
The cast is uniformly excellent, but the two leads deserve special mention.
Scot Hughes does a remarkable job as Nixon. Because he was such a distinctive character in terms of voice and appearance, it would be easy to lapse into a Nixon parody, but Hughes never does. He does, however, capture Nixon’s body language well. Nixon seldom seemed comfortable in his own skin, and Hughes’ performance conveys that with admirable restraint. Those unfamiliar with the real Nixon will see someone with an odd mixture of fierce ambition, sweaty self-doubt and barely contained resentment of a world he feels has betrayed him — all of which is very Nixon.
Frost is a bon vivant with deepseated insecurities, and Kehry Anson Lane illuminates the character’s fragility and resilience. Frost’s serious embrace of superficial things results in a contradictory personality that is by turns off-putting and charming, but Lane succeeds in making Frost a sympathetic figure even at his worst moments.
It’s also worth mentioning the efficient and unobtrusive work of the production’s stage crew. Frost/Nixon is one act, but has 22 scenes, some very brief, and it requires a lot of quick changes to the play’s minimalist sets on a curtain-less stage.
It’s possible to imagine a staging of Frost/Nixon that deliberately attempts to evoke Trump and his brand of criminality (which, unlike Nixon’s, is TV-savvy), or one that downplays the humor in favor melodramatic line-readings, but neither would serve the material or the audience as well the ICCT production does.
Remaining shows of Frost/Nixon will be held this weekend at the James Theater Friday & Saturday, Jan. 24 & 25 at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 26 at 2 p.m.
