"This recent spurt is clearly because of the coming election," says Lees, who works for a West Valley City computer gaming company. "Each election cycle generates new interest in the play. These past years since it was written have been tumultuous for our presidents, and I think people are a lot more interested in people who are presidents now. During the Clinton administration, anything about impeachment really struck home. Now anything about the war strikes home."
Dick and Henry: "Nixon's Nixon" is an intriguing fusion of politics, history and, most important, comedy. On the night before his resignation, Nixon summons Henry Kissinger to the Lincoln room of the White House. He is determined not to give up and wants Kissinger's support.
Afraid for his own career, Kissinger is intent on persuading Nixon to step down. In a flurry of mixed paranoia and elation, Nixon coerces Kissinger into helping him re-enact all the triumphs of his administration.
The playwright invented re-enactments to solve a problem. "I wanted the two characters onstage in real time, [but] that's a very difficult thing to do," he says, knowing that the lack of drama in watching two men talk might quickly bore audiences. "But somewhere I'd read that in high school, [Nixon] was considered to be quite a good actor, which is hard to believe because he seems so uncomfortable in his own body."
Unmasked men: Nevertheless, the re-enactments serve as a brilliant device. Besides being the source of much of the play's humor, they provide a way for the characters to reveal themselves and their manipulations to the audience.
Jerry Whiddon directed a revival of Lees' play this summer at Maryland's Round House Theatre, near Washington, D.C., after producing the play originally in 1999. "When I read it, I was completely taken with how tight it was, what a ride it was," Whiddon says. "I thought it was ridiculous that it hadn't been done in Washington at that time. It had one of the biggest days in our box-office history, I remember. Ted Koppel came to see it. It was a terrific experience for us."
So why mount the play again, some nine years later? What makes it still work? "On the one hand, it's a clown show," Whiddon says. "On the other hand, it's a clown show with the rumblings of enormous sorrow. He wrote so beautifully to the voices, the noise that these characters made. He really tapped into something at the core of these men - their ego, their hubris, their fear, all operating at the same time. It's all you can eat, just a buffet."
Fran Pruyn directed Salt Lake Acting Company's 1996 production after working closely with Lees in the 1980s when his first plays - including "Monday Night Football" and "The Foggiest Notion," a musical co-written with Barb Gandy, Christine Glassie and Jeffrey Price - were mounted at TheatreWorks West.
She describes "Nixon's Nixon" as "monumentally resilient, consummately a theater piece, and eminently stageable: It's two characters; there aren't a lot of elaborate set changes [or] costume changes. It's plot-driven and language-driven. It's a well-crafted piece of theater, and it's funny. For two hours, you can sit in the audience and laugh at the show and be mystified with the fact that this person ran our country."
Lees, a Utah native, grew up in the theater, as his father, Jay Lees, was the entire theater department at Westminster College for 34 years. One of its theaters is named for him, while the Lees Main Stage at Pioneer Theater is dedicated to a cousin. "In my family, if you don't get a theater or stage named after you, you're not up to snuff," Lees observes wryly.
He started acting at a young age. "Whenever [Dad] had a play that needed a kid, it would be me," Rees says. But Jay Lees didn't think theater was a secure profession, so he encouraged his son's interest in computer engineering, which Russ Lees studied at Boston University.
Interesting response: After returning to Salt Lake City with his degree in the mid-1980s, Lees got involved with TheatreWorks and started writing plays, which led him to return to Boston to study with the legendary Nobel PrizeÐwinning poet and playwright Derek Wolcott. His mentor staged a professional production of Lees' graduate project, "The Case of the Blue Narcissus." "From that play, I learned that if people come out of the theater saying, 'That was very interesting,' it's not a good thing," Lees says and laughs.
While in Boston, Lees began to write "Nixon's Nixon," which eventually made its way to an off-Broadway theater in 1995 and then the Salt Lake Acting Company.
Work and family occupy much of Lees' time these days, but in many ways he has never left the theater. He got into the video game industry in the mid-1990s by designing a game called "The Dark Eye." He currently works for Sensory Sweep, where he writes video games and directs actors as they record the text.
Computer gaming requires a completely different kind of writing, but Lees considers it challenging and creative and likes drawing upon his computer-engineering experience to design new games.
Lees has ideas about what makes performances of "Nixon's Nixon" still work. "I don't really care if the actors try to be Nixon and Kissinger," he says, "because for me, the play isn't about those historical figures; it's about a man with incredible power, and he's got to give it up. That's what makes it interesting."
Maybe. But it's up to the playwright to keep it entertaining, and Salt Lake director Pruyn cites quick wit as one of Lees' gifts.
"He's a funny guy," she says, "and he has a piercing intelligence. He never loses sight of what it's like to be the everyman, [and] he understands theater. So many playwrights want to write their story, but they don't understand what it means to put it on the stage: They can't drive the plot through dialogue."
Through the years, Lees has collected anecdotes about the play, among them the two actors and director who fell so in love with it that they spent two years touring it around the world to places as far-flung as Hong Kong, Australia and London's West End. Then there was the time he went to consult with Jim Simpson, the director of the New York production, and discovered, when a tall redhead opened the door, that Simpson was married to Sigourney Weaver.
Director Jerry Whiddon credits Lees for crafting something truly rare, a political play with staying power. "There's an intelligence with a heart that is not always there," he says, "and that's what really grabs me. How bright he is, and how his lines - some of the exchanges in that play will live forever."
"In my family, if you don't get a theater or stage named after you, you're not up to snuff."
