Peter Morgan’s celebrated Broadway play “Frost/Nixon” presents the historic 1977 televised duel between underrated British playboy talk-show host David Frost and disgraced President Richard Nixon as if it were a heavyweight title fight.
Even from political exile, Frost would be no match for the still-formidable Nixon, with his media savvy and lifetime of foreign-policy triumphs. Forget Ali vs. Frazier. This would be Ali vs. Erkel.
Yet after being bloodied for 14 rounds, Frost somehow was able to expose a weakness in Nixon that led to the president’s first admission of guilt and apology to the nation for abuse of power, which helped the country finally start to close its festering, open wounds of Vietnam, Watergate and his pardon by Gerald Ford.
Compared with the 2007 Broadway production and subsequent film — which landed Nixon portrayer Frank Langella on Barbara Walters’ “10 Most Fascinating” list — the Longmont Theatre’s Company’s first Colorado staging of “Frost/Nixon” would also have to be considered a staggering underdog. This is the kind of meaty, important historical drama you’d expect first from the Denver Center.
But while director John Thornberry’s effort isn’t exactly a first-round TKO, the scorecard would have to give this staging a win on points.
It’s a victory at all that this venerable, 54-year-old Longmont community theater is the first to step into the ring with a fascinating and surprisingly entertaining play that recounts first how Frost won the exclusive rights to interview Nixon for 12 two-hour interviews.
The play really comes alive in the second act, when the two go mano-a-mano before TV cameras that here, as on Broadway, beam a live feed onto an 11-foot screen that hangs above the actors.
This technical achievement accomplishes a similar kind of duality to the animal masks worn by actors in “The Lion King” — we can watch the verbal sparring in the flesh or on the magnified and unforgiving screen, just as 400 million people witnessed Nixon’s downfall. It also serves the practical purpose of helping patrons in the cavernous Longmont Performing Arts Center experience the battle taking place between veteran actor Stuart O’Steen as Nixon and Robert Mess as Frost in a more visceral way.
It pays off spectacularly at the play’s painfully thrilling climax, when Nixon is reduced to that same sweating, caged animal who lost the 1960 presidential election to the more telegenic John F. Kennedy. Only now he’s older, and more resigned to his fate.
This play is no mere history lesson. It conveys the central facts through an interactive narrator (played by Michael Steadman), but what’s most intriguing is how it subtley conveys the surprising commonalities between these two very different fighters who have both fallen out of favor, and each is now seeking redemption at the other’s expense.
O’Steen carries the larger burden, swinging as he must from cocky, cash-strapped ex-president who controls Frost in the early rounds with almost dismissive ease. It’s a role that can be played with larger-than-life verbosity, but O’Steen instead plays it cool, with an easygoing charm that relies on truth over caricature or mere impersonation — with signature Nixon growls occasionally thrown in.
At first glance, Mess seems as overmatched as Frost himself, but in quick time the young actor’s casual charm wins over the audience as surely as Frost earned Nixon’s respect, displaying a carefree demeanor that morphs from Frost’s greatest weakness to his most potent weapon.
Around the edges we meet the handlers for both heavyweights, and by comparison, the supporting cast is fairly green.
Scholars have criticized how the playwright has consolidated and fabricated certain facts — the most riveting moment of the play springs wholly from Morgan’s imagination — yet the essential truth of the matter is as plain as Nixon’s pained, defeated face.
The play’s blunt implication is that the most damaging blows Nixon took were self-inflicted. For what we see is formerly the most powerful man in the world, ravaged by self-loathing, guilt, alcohol, loneliness and perhaps even a king’s madness, all but throwing in the towel on a fight it would have taken a knockout for him to lose.
A leader who for so long had artfully sidestepped culpability and responsibility, simply all out of fight.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Frost/Nixon” *** (out of four stars)
Longmont Theatre Company, 513 Main St., 303-772-5200. By Peter Morgan. Through Nov. 19. 2 hours, 15 minutes. 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; also 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14. $15-$17.303-772-5200 or
