Frost/Nixon

By the end of Frost/Nixon, onstage through March 29 at the Ahmanson, celebrated actor Stacy Keach has so humanized the character of Richard Nixon that the view of him as pure evil, held as an article of faith by the aging hippies in the audience, is in danger of collapse. The generation that worshipped at the altar of "relevance" applauds and cheers Nixon's comeuppance as if seeing it for the first time, but gets a taste of its waning influence as younger audience members warm to Mr. Keach's rich, compelling portrait of the complex politician.

In fact, playwright Peter Morgan may be the harbinger of things to come as he does not kick Dick Nixon around so much as examines him as an artifact of television history. The central character of Morgan's play is less the 37th President of the United States or the British TV personality who rose to fame on the basis of the 1977 televised interviews of him than the medium itself.

In the era now where a huge portion of all television product is the non-scripted but tightly controlled "interview" - whether played out in the phony intimacy of late night talk shows or in the estrogen-laced salons of Oprah and Ellen - canned conversation with celebrities is as commonplace as the ephemeral products they are there plugging.

But in the adolescent years of TV, nobody, neither interviewer nor subject, quite had the thing down so pat, and surprisingly real things often happened in those free-wheeling encounters. Morgan's play is about such an instance, a moment so dependent on television itself that the denouement, when Nixon finally admits his culpability in the scandal that cost him his office, plays out on the huge bank of television monitors which sit above the action, while below the two live actors, seated in leather chairs, are reduced to spear carriers by the transformative power of the medium. It seems a contextually inappropriate use of the theater, but it's dramatically right on target, proving again Marshall McLuhan's magnificent axiom that for television, the medium is the message.

Playing Frost with oily silkiness, Alan Cox nails his character perfectly. Frost rose to prominence on the basis of this interview, and like Barbara Walters before him, gained a somewhat unearned reputation for depth and gravitas that had far more to do with the power of the close-up than it did the craftiness of the interviewer.

Each of the partners in this pas de deux is surrounded by people with agendas. Nixon's flank is guarded by his bulldog, retired Marine colonel Jack Brennan (Ted Koch) who was the ex-president's post-resignation chief of staff. Frost's aides-de-camp include the journalists Jim Reston (Brian Sgambati) and Bob Zelnick (Bob Ari). Though Frost and his familiars schemed to evoke a grand mea culpa from Nixon, and though the former president's staff tried to prevent it, it occurred only because Nixon's indomitable will was tempered throughout his entire life by a self-pitying inferiority complex. The man was capable of transforming the political life of the planet, yet he never escaped a childhood desire simply to be liked. That yearning was the source of Frost's triumph over him in 1977 and on the basis of that, Frost went on to a lucrative career in TV.

Today, Mr. Nixon lies peacefully next to his wife Patricia in the gardens of his presidential library in Yorba Linda awaiting the judgment of historians as yet unborn. Mr. Frost is alive and working for Al Jazeera, while the ranks of angry 60s radicals are starting to thin out a bit.