Departments
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Week of 23 January 1998 |
Vol. I, No. 17 |
Feature
Article
Now he belongs to the stages
Alum's play on final eve of X-President Nixon
Eric McHenry
Russell Lees isn't the first writer to offer a speculative account of what happened in the White House on August 7, 1974.
The BU alumnus (ENG'78, GRS'92), whose one-act play Nixon's Nixon was an off-Broadway hit during the 1995-96 season, says one of his greatest writing challenges was to eschew both the historical reportage of Woodward and Bernstein's Final Days on the one hand, and the satire of Saturday Night Live's famous resignation eve prayer sketch on the other. His play depicts a desperate and at times delusional Richard Nixon attempting to contrive, with Henry Kissinger, an eleventh-hour scheme to save his presidency.
"I really wanted to distance myself from the Saturday Night Live sketch," Lees says. "I didn't want people to think that the tone of my play was spoofy, even though I wanted what I was writing to be funny. So I had to fight those two tendencies -- to satirize and to give a history lesson -- throughout."
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Jonathan Bolt (left) and
Christian Kauffmann portray Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger in the Merrimack Repertory Theatre's
production of Nixon's Nixon, a hit one-act play by
BU alumnus Russell Lees. Photo by Eric Antoniou
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"Derek's whole class is based on looking at scene work and talking about it, and he encourages graduates to come back and present," Lees says. "So I put up the first 10 pages in one of his workshops, and Derek's comment was that it had both too much parody and too much documentary.
"The work was an attempt to be neither, but be both," he says. "So I took that comment to heart and began trying to meld them more effectively."
The consensus is that he succeeded. After a well-received run at the MCC Theatre, a not-for-profit with a 100-seat venue in New York City, Nixon's Nixon moved off-Broadway -- to a larger, commercial theater -- where it enjoyed critical favor and greater exposure. Since then it has become, in the words of Boston Globe reporter Patti Hartigan, "the two-character play of choice on the regional theater circuit." At one point last year, three substantial professional-level companies -- the Milwaukee and San Jose Repertory Theaters and the Cincinnati Playhouse -- had productions running almost simultaneously. The Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell is currently staging the play.
Lees grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, where he now resides. He took degrees in engineering from BU and Stanford University and for several years worked as a professional designer of X-ray machines. But he never felt completely satisfied with that role; theater, by contrast, was a dependable source of fascination for him.
"I'd always been around theater," he says. "As an engineering student at BU, I acted in the Boston University Stage Troupe, which consisted of non-theater majors who wanted to do plays. Even at Stanford I tried to remain involved, mostly as an actor.
"So I've always had these aspirations. I worked as an engineer, but every few years I would quit. In the '80s I quit and went to England, where I studied as an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. That sounds rather pretentious, but they have a summer program and pretty much anybody can get in. It's a great program, though, and it was really valuable to me."
Practical concerns eventually forced Lees to return to Salt Lake City and engineering. But in 1990 he left again, this time for New Hampshire.
"I had a connection that allowed me to get an internship at the American Stage Festival, which is a summer stock theater," he says. "Up there I met some people from Boston. One of them needed a roommate when the summer was over, so I just kind of ended up in Boston.
"By then I had already started writing, and my intention was to continue. I'd had plays produced here in Salt Lake, and I'd saved a little money, so I thought, 'Well, I'll just sit here in Boston for a while and write plays.'"
Lees also enrolled in some theater-related courses at the Harvard Extension School, one of which was taught by Kate Snodgrass. She recognized his talent and encouraged him to apply to the graduate program in playwriting at BU, where she is a member of the teaching faculty.
"I thought he was a playwright," recalls Snodgrass, who is also the producing director of the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. "He was obviously a dramatist, and he was writing about things that were important. He wasn't writing about roommates. His work had real theme and strong characterization, which is surprising from a beginning writer."
Lees does not hesitate to return the compliment. The instruction he received from Walcott and Snodgrass, he says, was definitive in his development as a playwright.
"I entered the program thinking I could use the degree. I didn't really believe anyone could teach me anything," he says. "I was astonished, because I felt like I learned so very much."
Nixon's Nixon, by Russell Lees, runs Wednesdays through Sundays until January 31 at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell. For more information, call 978-454-3926.