Stacy Keach on Richard Nixon and the Power of Television
Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, starring Alan Cox and Stacy Keach, plays at the Paramount Theatre, 911 Pine St., Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 1 and 6:30 p.m. Tix $18-$60.
"I don't know that you can make him too sympathetic. I don't think that that's possible."
Stacy Keach
In interviews, Keach has spoken about how he approaches Nixon as a sort of King Lear-esque character, self-deluded and self-destructive. But Lear, of course, is a sympathetic character, and we were curious whether Keach saw the potential to make Nixon too sympathetic (being, after all, a far better actor than Nixon ever was).
"[Peter Morgan] doesn't go out of his way to defend what Nixon did," explains Keach of the play, "but he gives us a perspective in terms of why he did what he did it, in terms of him really believing his justification for doing what he did because he made mistakes of the heart rather than of the head. That he was trying to protect people. That he was kind of a martyr. But that's about as far as you can go in the direction of sympathy."
Writing of the play, Seattlest MvB said, "Keach's Nixon is some of the best acting you're going to see in your life. It's shot through with the truth of Nixon--his self-destructiveness, paranoia, viciousness, intellect, strategic genius, and sentimentality--and yet never amounts to imitation. Keach suggests Nixon here and there with a florid tone, bitten-off speech, crabbed posture--all elements he subtly embodies so that, as you watch, Nixon becomes this other man on stage."
Asked about the challenge of achieving that sort of power in the role, Mr. Keach explained, "One of the most difficult parts is right at the very beginning, because the behavior--right as he's about to give his resignation speech--that he demonstrates is so bizarre, so off-the-wall. I actually had the privilege, the night he resigned, of seeing the resignation speech at a person's house that had a live feed to the White House, and got all that bizarre behavior. It doesn't seem Nixonian. And so my responsibility as an actor is first of all to convince you that I'm Richard Nixon, and at the same time to do so is in the context of this irrational behavior."
"It's like an overture of what you're about to see," he added.
What follows is a long, tendentious battle of wits, between an ambitious and desperate young TV journalist trying to climb back from obscurity, and a self-deluded former power broker. For all the comparisons to the likes of King Lear, the play recalls nothing so much as Sartre's No Exit, a play in which damned souls compete to convince each other to believe their lies and thus achieve salvation. Except here, it's not the other that has to be convinced, it's the vast, unseen television audience. David Frost (Alan Cox) is angling for the scoop of a lifetime: getting Nixon to express remorse. Nixon wants to convince the world that the cover-up was a matter of best intentions, more justified by far than the initial crime.
Strangely, this is not something Ron Howard seems to have picked up on. His film is a period piece, a counterpart to All the President's Men, that portrays courageous truth-seekers fighting the powers-that-be for the sake of the public good. The play, in contrast, interrogates this view of the Frost interviews; as Keach pointed out, during the action, the film that Frost's crew is taking is projected behind the stage. The audience watches the process of Frost framing his subject, the lurid close-ups on the face, aching for the Barbara Walters moment where the subject breaks.
By stripping away the politics and context of Nixon's malfeasance, Morgan reveals a contest in which Frost was every bit as morally ambiguous as his subject was. And that, perhaps more than anything, is why the play continues to resonate. "I think it's a reminder of the power of television, how television can change our lives," says Keach. "The kind of insecurities Nixon had about his image are very revealing in terms of what's important in order to be successful in either politics or in the entertainment industry."
