Russell Lees: Nixon: Our Enduring Obsession

About the author:
Ten years ago, Russell Lees captured the imagination of off-Broadway theatergoers with Nixon's Nixon, a gripping play that imagines what happened in the White House on August 7, 1974, the night before Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. On hand to hear the commander-in-chief's last ruminations before leaving power: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Like the rest of us, Lees doesn't know what was said, but his version of their conversation, produced by MCC Theatre, became a rare mainstream hit with a political bent. In a world now vastly changed politically, Nixon's Nixon is back off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre with the same cast and director. Lees, who set aside a career as an engineer to study playwriting under the tutelage of Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, now works in the interactive game industry and was creative director for The Dark Eye, an adventure game based on the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. His most recent play, Monticell' explores the complicated relationships of Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings family. Not surprisingly, his first hit remains very close to his heart.

"My god!" was my stunned reaction when I first learned that my play Nixon's Nixon was going to be revived off-Broadway. "I'm old enough to be revived!"

The dawning realization of age and mortality aside the other clue was those odd eyebrow hairs, the greater wonder was that the wily Richard Milhous Nixon, long gone though he be, is trying to stage one last comeback. The first production of the play in 1996 was unlikely enough. Somehow my script found its way to MCC Theater's literary office, where, despite decades of theater wisdom deriding "political" plays and for reasons still not entirely clear to me, someone actually read it. MCC decided to take the risk and produce a play about Nixon by an entirely unknown playwright. Darned if the thing wasn't a hit.

Now, 10 years later, Gerry Bamman and Steve Mellor are retuning to their original roles as Nixon and Henry Kissinger. I get to return to the scene of the crime and relive the most exciting event of my professional life. Sitting in rehearsal, playwrights are tradition-bound and, according to a little-known by-law, union-bound to grouse, obsess and throw tantrums over irrelevancies. But I'm finding it incredibly difficult to work up the required hissy-fit. Gerry and Steve, who won accolades for their performances the first time around, have astonishingly grown more solidly into their parts; it's as though they'd been secretly rehearsing for a decade a long time, even by Stanislavskian standards.

Unable to complain about the actors, I turn my neurotic focus to the always-suspect link in the theater chain: the script. Surely something is wrong with it. Shouldn't I be rewriting the damn thing? Make it "relevant" in some way? Shouldn't I be drawing parallels and contrasts with more current events? But, alas, they're already there! The disputed election, the paranoid secrecy, the misbegotten war, the mumbling advisors—it's as though the Nixon administration was a case study in all the things that can go awry in a modern democracy.

I think that's the reason why, even though only a few of us can still keep the McCords and Magruders straight, Nixon continues to fascinate. He embodies something much larger than just a troubled presidency. You don't think of Nixon necessarily as quintessentially American, yet somehow we kept electing him. Somehow this grocer's son got under our skin. Somehow his paranoia, obsessiveness, grandeur and pettiness live, stashed away in the dark closets of the American psyche. We can't help but air them out every now and again.

So, yes. The production is in fine shape, the script is left alone and I'm 10 years older. I still can't quite come to terms with that. The heavens revolve, the seasons hurtle past, the world spins through its cycles, leaving us all changed in every possible way. But somehow, can it be? The comeback kid is on the prowl. Nixon's still the one.