
At the end of Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, currently running a limited engagement at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, a live televised image of Frank Langella, as Richard Nixon, is projected on a large multi-monitor mosaic backdrop. The image is frightening, the stuff of nightmares, not so much because it is the moment when Nixon finally admits wrong-doing, but because Frank Langella’s heavily made-up face looks like a large Mardi-Gras puppet head.

When I saw Oliver Stone’s Nixon with Anthony Hopkins as the paranoid President. the characterization was so excessive in it’s sleaziness that I began it to feel sorry for ol’ Tricky Dick. But perhaps I have some perspective, as the Nixon era happened during my childhood and I never really comprehended the zeitgeist of Watergate. It is hard for me to hate Nixon precisely because I view him as an historical figure, who is intriguing in both his excesses and his genius. The Nixon administration is yet another historical case study of the corruption of power.
I remember watching the Nixon interviews on our console television. I was mostly bored by the proceedings, unsure why father was screaming obscenities at the television. Years later, upon seeing them again, I was struck by how disarmingly charming Nixon was in his self-effacement. Nixon, of course, was a Quaker, a sect known for it’s active pacifism, an intriguing contradiction for someone who ordered the carpet bombing of Cambodia.
But Frank Langella’s Nixon, with his exaggerated stooped walk and carefully studied gesticulations and vocal inflections, is a disarmingly charming caricature but bereft of the venality and menace that lurked underneath Nixon’s affability. I didn’t hate the Langella Nixon, I didn’t love the Langella Nixon. I simply didn’t care.

Equally irritating was Stephen Kunkin as Jim Reston. As the narrator and moral conscience, he was often posed, leaning against the wall, watching the action with contempt and editorial comment.
As Jack Brennon, Nixon’s bellicose chief of staff, Corey Johnson embarrasses himself by standing and, for no apparent reason, barking his lines. It is yet another hackneyed characterization, the military man who’s single overriding characteristic is to bark like a drill sergeant. The rest of the cast were equally uninspired and two-dimensional.
Despite the acting, I did enjoy Peter Morgan's script. No new ground is broken, but it's swift and clever. Unfortunately, it is bogged down in the pedestrian direction of Michael Grandage. Grandage belongs to the "Pretty Picture" school of directing, where every moment is contrived to present a composed picture to the audience. Unfortunately, dramatic action is not static and not composed of pretty pictures and only emphasizes the two dimensionality of the acting. Theater is a temporal craft, like dance or music. If I wanted to look at pretty pictures, I would go to the museum.