[NEohioPAL] 'Nixon's Nixon' at Actors' Summit a timely and intensely entertaining play about Nixon and Kissinger Tony Brown Review

[Neil Thackaberry]

'Nixon's Nixon' at Actors' Summit a timely and intensely entertaining
play about Nixon and Kissinger

by Tony Brown/Plain Dealer Theater Critic <mailto:tonycritic at gmail.com>
Sunday October 26, 2008

REVIEW 

What: Actors' Summit presents the play by Russell Lees, directed by
Constance Thackaberry. 

When: Runs through Nov. 9. 

Where: 86 Owen Brown St., Hudson. 

Tickets: $25-$28. 330-342-0800. Or actorssummit.org. 

Politics isn't just local. It's personal, as becomes immediately and
lastingly obvious in "Nixon's Nixon," which made a timely opening over
the weekend at Actors' Summit in Hudson. 

It might at first seem opportunistic to stage a show just now that
portrays what might have happened on the alcohol-drenched night of Aug.
7, 1974 -- two days before Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency --
in the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House. 

But Russell Lees' brilliantly constructed and language-rich script takes
us beyond the last days of an unpopular president. 

It also demonstrates Lord Acton's observation: "Power tends to corrupt,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad
men." That's a handy thing to have in mind as we head to voting booth. 

And it provides two glorious opportunities for actors to revel in two
historically gigantic roles, roles that Lees has deepened with his
imagings. Actors' Summit rises to the challenge with bravura
performances by Neil Thackaberry and George Roth. 

"Nixon's Nixon" made its debut in New York in 1995, and the Actors'
Summit playbill goes out of its way to indicate that not a word was
changed to make it more timely now. 

Nixon (Thackaberry, bigger than life and twice as paranoid) does appear
in "Nixon's Nixon." 

But for Lees, it is Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger (Roth,
studiously exact in his manners and accent, and hilarious in his
approach to the wacked-out president) who is "Nixon" to Nixon. 

The play uses a real, and famous, meeting between the two men who
crafted the most important treaties in the detente with Soviet Union and
normalized relations with the People's Republic of China. 

(They also, to be fair and balanced, came up with the cockamamie idea of
bombing Cambodia and trying to keep it a secret.) 

Between hits of brandy and vodka, these two powerful men battle each
other and themselves as they try to find a way to salvage their
reputations, their accomplishments after Watergate. 

In the play, they toy with the awful -- and awfully funny, in retrospect
-- idea of creating a foreign crisis diversion, Thackaberry's Nixon
playing the mad Gen. Jack D. Ripper and Roth's Kissinger his conniving
Dr. Strangelove. 

The two come to their senses. Nixon says he will resign, His
"Machiavelli with a belly" sighs with relief. The forces of history,
riffed on so nicely by Lees, Thackaberry and Roth, march on. Suddenly
it's 2008. 

What have we learned? 





 

 

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