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Nixon follies
Historical high jinks at the Huntington
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Nixon’s Nixon
By Russell Lees. Directed by Charles Towers. Set by Bill Clarke. Costumes by Hillary Derby. Lighting by Dan Kotlowitz. With Keith Jochim and Tim Donoghue. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through April 7.


His own petulant prophecy notwithstanding, as long as there is Nixon’s Nixon, we will have Richard Nixon to kick around. But what’s notable about Russell Lees’s play is not that it puts its foot to the easy target of the 37th president. The achievement of Lees’s exuberant political satire, which imagines the actual but unrecorded late-night meeting between Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the eve of the former’s 1974 resignation, is that it portrays Nixon as at once a herky-jerky clown and a tragic hero. In the end, Lees’s Nixon seems less to descend into ignominy than to ascend like an awkward phoenix from the ashes of his own egomania-battled repentance.

Lees’s play is not new (though it resonates differently in the light of subsequent events). An Off Broadway hit that debuted in 1995, it had a previous local production at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell. Indeed, recently installed MRT artistic director Charles Towers has made a cottage industry of directing the play, first at Cincinnati’s Playhouse in the Park in 1997 and then in venues from San Diego to Edinburgh, Dublin, Toronto, Hong Kong, and London. The reprise of Towers’s near-operatic production at the Huntington reflects both the theater’s faith in the director, who in 1996 staged a successful To Kill a Mockingbird there, and its commitment, under second-season artistic director Nicholas Martin, to Boston and Boston University–affiliated playwrights. Lees, a Boston resident, studied playwriting at BU under Nobel laureate Derek Walcott. He was in high school in Utah, however, when the events imagined in Nixon’s Nixon took place.

Lees must be pleased by Towers’s production, its fantasy element aptly conveyed by Dan Kotlowitz’s lighting. The two actors, Keith Jochim as Nixon and Tim Donoghue as Kissinger, manage, superbly, the task of playing, rather than just impersonating, their grotesquely larger-than-life characters. As Towers remarks, " This is not a Rich Little nightclub act. " Yet the production dares to write large, with Jochim’s stiffly expansive Nixon shooting his digital V’s to the stars and Donoghue’s wily Kissinger playing the self-interested straight man to the hilt. Lees has remarked that he considers Kissinger the more dangerous power monger of the two, and that comes across here. At the Huntington, as in whispered reports of the actual Lincoln Sitting Room encounter, a drunken Nixon beseeches Kissinger to kneel and pray with him. But here only Nixon kneels. Kissinger, standing, answers the boss’s entreaties as if he were God.

What Kissinger wants, of course, is for Nixon to fall on his sword, so as to ensure that " Super K " and the pair’s foreign-policy legacy will continue under President Ford. But Kissinger is not running this late-night show (which in Lees’s version involves the imbibing of so much brandy that by evening’s end the participants are lurching). Jochim’s looming Nixon — his big head jutting so that it gets in your face before the rest of him does — traps his tuxedo’d deputy in his dark night of the soul. (Moreover, he is not without a wire-tap transcript or two with which to threaten the smug Secretary.) Nixon indulges, by turns, in angry self-justification, profane yet babyish fits of spite, and the great moments of his presidency; the last of these he insists that Kissinger re-enact with him, with Henry playing, among other roles, then-Soviet-premier Brezhnev, Chairman Mao, and daughter Julie. Julie with a German accent is an experience, but nothing tops the politically incorrect reminiscence in which both men imitate, in Charlie Chan gibberish, the cadence of the Chinese leader at his historic meeting with Nixon.

Things grow increasingly surreal as Nixon and Kissinger return to their well-worn war-mongering strategies in search of an alternative to the president’s inevitable resignation. But what’s chilling in their deliriously escalating scenario of an invented crisis involving Russia, China, and a rumpled Nixon loping around intoning " Kerblooie " is how little this Wag the Dog invention differs from an earlier flashback in which the two cook up the secret bombing of Cambodia.

" I appeal to the Richard Nixon in everybody, " says Lees’s Nixon, and indeed the playwright seems to mean him as a stand-in for our collective paranoia, stick-to-itiveness, and shame. Finally, as the gilded, sepulchral walls of the White House melt away and Nixon floats toward the chopper that is to bear him into the mist of American myth, he seems almost purged, as if he had raged and sworn and groveled and plotted all our sins away. That his so doing can be so hilarious for this decades-later 90 minutes doubtless has something to do with its having taken place on the Huntington’s stage and not the world’s.

Issue Date: March 14-21, 2002
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