Web Letters: Nixon's Broadway Revival

Granted this article is now a year and a half old, but the original interview was not readily available at that time, so I think Eliabeth remembered it wrong when she claimed that there was no "knockout." I just purchased and watched Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews, and I'd beg to differ.

I had only a vague recollection of this interview from when it originally aired, as I was a child a the time, so for all intent and purpose this recent viewing is my first, and it lacks no impact thirty years later. It's shocking to watch Nixon's resolve diminish over the course of the interviews, and to see David Frost manipulate his underdog status into arguably the most important political grilling in history.

The play was fantastic, and I'm sure the new movie will be be fine, but let's not lose sight of the real deal, which, as compelling as a work of fiction can be, is never going to top the actual event it chronicles.

Matt Kennedy

Lynn, MA

All Broadway plays distort reality in exactly this way, and are shallow in exactly this way--but Drew wants something even shallower: Nixon as super-villain conspiring with villainous Frost. Not only aesthetically unbalanced and unwise (like her desire to have half a two-character play be presented as clumsy and unattractive), not only a premise with no place to go, but under that thin veneer a desire to paint Nixon as utterly irredeemable, Richard III without Richard's seductiveness, so that this time, for a change, even the stage villain will alienate and bore the audience.

The line, "When the President does it, it's not illegal," will be remembered better if it gets a laugh. Again, Drew doesn't want successful drama or even successful propaganda: She wants a Nixon so hateful the play folds immediately, preferably even before it opens.

James Rawley

Redlands, CA