To get to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, you have to drive right past the Watergate Hotel.
The complex squats like a giant, gray concrete toad near New Hampshire and Virginia avenues, where it looms both literally and figuratively over the production of Frost/Nixon being staged barely one block away.
The Watergate is visible from the Kennedy Center terrace. Stroll outside either before or after the show, and it's easy to imagine that you can peer into the windows of the former Democratic National Headquarters, where a botched burglary in 1972 eventually toppled a presidency.
Sometimes, history and art really are that close.
Even without this accident of geography, this is a compelling story - so much so that political junkies can catch both the national tour (starring Stacy Keach and running through Sunday) and the major-release film (starring Frank Langella and opening Dec. 26) in a period of less than a month.
Frost/Nixon is the story of a cat-and-mouse chase between two improbable opponents: the disgraced former U.S. chief executive Richard Nixon and the British talk-show host David Frost, who had a reputation as a playboy and dilettante. This is a man so seemingly frivolous that he picks up a strange woman by offering on the spur of the moment to let her tag along on a history-making, career-defining business trip.
Nixon was a former trial attorney with justifiable confidence in his own verbal adroitness, and he agreed to the interviews as a means of resuscitating his career. He expected Frost to toss him lighter-than-air, puffball questions that he could easily bat away or turn to his advantage.
For his part, Frost - egged on by his team of advisers - was determined to put Nixon on trial, to wrest from him the admission of wrongdoing and apology that Congress had failed to elicit.
Nixon famously crumbled under Frost's questioning. Peter Morgan's script raises provocative questions, which it can't fully resolve, about what caused the former president to throw in the towel.
In a daring move for a play about a historic and well-documented event, Morgan imagines an incident that never occurred: a drunken phone call that Nixon makes to Frost the night before the final interview.
The scene is an invention, but the insight it yields is solid enough. It would seem that both the politician and the talk-show host suffered from a sense of inferiority. Both were embattled, and both had something to prove to a legion of sneering critics.
