David Versus Goliath in Bay Street's 'Frost/Nixon'
Strange, how a man once regarded as the personification of political evil can grow in stature in the memory. Many in the audience at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, where “Frost/Nixon,” the 2006 Peter Morgan play, is onstage until July 22, probably cheered when Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, announced his resignation in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. Three years later, they probably cheered again as his mea culpa drama was broadcast during a famous series of television interviews conducted by the British talk show host David Frost.
Yet those very people, now a few decades older, as well as anyone too young to have tuned in to the Watergate trials, might well watch this smartly entertaining Bay Street production and believe the crooked president to be something of a tragic Shakespearean figure, a strangely sympathetic character, and also a jokey one, the one we most want to see in order to have an entertaining evening at the theater.
And therein lies the unanswerable question: Was my inability to register exactly how slippery a fellow the former president really was a result of the playwright engaging in some well-documented invention of the actual events? (Historians have criticized the writing for crossing the line of dramatic integrity, calling it a gross misrepresentation.) Or does Tricky Dick simply seem remarkably less egregious, so much more intelligent, thoughtful, and, well, presidential compared to the current occupant of the office? Or even the one from 2001 to 2009, during which time the play was written.
Conjecture seems pointless. Instead, go see this staging, in which Daniel Gerroll plays Frost, a feckless star-chasing interviewer who finds his purpose, and Harris Yulin is Nixon, a man mired in his own ambition who loses his. It will be impossible to watch the show and not marvel at the relevance of the material today — the fake news, the political trickery, the controversy regarding Trump and Russia, and all the eerie resemblances to Watergate.
Sarna Lapine, with impressive Broadway and national credits, directs, and, after the first 20 minutes or so, which seem to lack a sense of stakes, the action grows into something altogether more substantial. The one-on-one interviews, which we can watch onstage or above on a series of television screens in terrifying close-ups, are superb. The set, designed by Wilson Chin, aided by clever video projections by Tal Yarden, is flexible and simple, easily morphing from studio to aircraft to hotel room to Nixon’s San Clemente mansion, where he lived in virtual exile.
Our guide and narrator of the stage version of events is Jim Reston, the journalist who spent years methodically documenting Nixon’s crimes. Reston’s anger and resentment against the man he held personally accountable for bringing down America is superbly portrayed in this show by Christian Conn. Others in supporting roles as Bob Zelnick, the experienced television newsman, and John Birt, Frost’s trusted friend and producer, seem to treat Nixon as though he were merely a querulous relative. But Stephen Lee Anderson as Swifty Lazar, Nixon’s publicist, is thoroughly entertaining as the showbiz caricature that Swifty truly was.
Mr. Morgan, one of Britain’s leading contemporary dramatists, specializes in stories that pit two figures against each other, David and Goliath-like. In the screenplay for “The Queen,” produced in 2006, Prime Minister Tony Blair convinces a frosty Queen Elizabeth to show her grieving subjects more empathy over the death of Princess Diana. In “The Last King of Scotland,” produced in 2007, a young Scottish doctor discovers the brutality of Idi Amin and leaves him, and the monstrous Amin is devastated. So, in this story, Frost must win out over Nixon, even if that technically never happened.
The playwright once described “Frost/Nixon” as “a thinking person’s ‘Rocky’ . . . written as a clash of two contrasting characters — one man who felt enormously comfortable with human beings and one who wasn’t comfortable at all.”
As a result, a brilliant duel unfolds onstage, with both men fighting for their professional lives. Mr. Gerroll, a British native with numerous stage, television, and film credits, bears an uncanny resemblance to the television interviewer and simply smashes it as the loafer-wearing, flip, and flashy showbiz version of the considerably more substantial and accomplished character that Sir David Frost was, even in the 1970s.
Credit must go, too, to Mr. Yulin, the veteran actor who owns lengthy screen and stage credits and, even at 80, is still enjoying a robust career. It cannot be easy to inherit a role that Frank Langella embodied and dominated on Broadway and in the 2008 “Frost/Nixon” film adaptation, for which he received an Oscar nomination. But Mr. Yulin attacks the role of a man so caricatured by decades of political satire that he has almost ceased to be real. He brings back to life Nixon’s weird syncopated cadences and his fascinating mix of grandness and vanity, as well as the self-serving evasiveness.
Despite the 20-year age difference between the actor now and Nixon in 1974, there is an almost disturbing resemblance between the two when Mr. Yulin’s Nixon-like face is projected on screens behind the live interview taking place onstage. We watch as Nixon, the master stonewaller, is confronted into telling the truth.
Own your actions out loud, Frost tells Nixon, whose face appears contorted by agony, “or you’re going to be haunted for the rest of your life.” We all know from history what Nixon will say, but still, at that moment, we collectively wonder if he’ll actually confess.
In real life, Nixon took a fee of $600,000 for the interviews and 20 percent of the profits, though the playwright omits any mention of the latter. Many have since pointed out that it was completely in Nixon’s interest to offer more than just a polite exercise in parrying.
So, the play stands as a reminder of accountability and truth and the way that our perceptions, more so today than ever before, are influenced by media images. The video projections repeatedly demonstrate what Nixon so prophetically observed: “Television and the close-up create their own set of meanings.”
Through masterful sleight of hand, the account of David Frost’s post-Watergate television interviews may not always be faithful to fact. But then, neither was Richard Nixon.