Southern Exposure

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

John Jeter’s play “Dirty Tricks” confirms the old adage that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the entire United States government isn’t out to get you. In a disorderly bed room, the very blond, very loud Martha Mitchell is preparing for an interview with Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes.” It is the eve of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. She, too, has a tape recorder, and knows how to use it:

Let it be known that any irregularities in my mental stability have been brought upon me by outside forces… namely the administration of King Richard Milhous Nixon. And some inside forces as well, I suppose; my husband, that gutless, despicable crook, John Newton Mitchell.

A boozy Southern belle and a canny political operative, Martha Mitchell was one of the more vivid characters to emerge from Watergate, when there was some stiff competition. She had great charm; she was also kind of nuts – an erratic woman fueled by pills and paranoia. Having amassed a long record of impromptu late-night phone calls to reporters, she became, during the scandal, an endless vexation for Nixon. In her zeal to defend her husband, the attorney general, she lashed out at the president. “If it hadn’t been for Martha there’d have been no Watergate,” Nixon said later.

That quote is treated in the show’s publicity as an unalloyed tribute to her from a vanquished foe. Actually, when Nixon said it, to David Frost in 1977, he was passing the buck at her expense. He was trying to claim that her mental condition distracted John Mitchell from doing his job, in whose absence “all these boys, these kids, these nuts” mismanaged Watergate. He was citing her weakness, not her strength.

Still, Martha was strong: She perceived Nixon’s misdeeds before many. “Dirty Tricks” does a mostly commendable job of telling her story, particularly coming from a first-time playwright. Mr. Jeter’s background includes designing music videos and window displays at Macy’s: An improbable background for someone writing a play about political history, but, in this case, a sufficient one.

Like Martha, Mr. Jeter hails from Pine Bluff, Ark. His affection for this sorority girl and Daughter of the American Revolution is clear, for her guts and sense of humor. She spends the play tidying up her apartment for the interview, wearing a hot pink, low-cut dress. “It seems to me that designers decided that women shouldn’t have busts,” she says, in one of many slights at the debased hippy culture she can’t stand. “Well, God gave me a bust. What am I supposed to do with it?”

Mr. Jeter is no hagiographer. Martha spoke out to protect her family, but some personal animus was at work also, directed both at “King Richard” and to his wife, who snubs her in reception lines and (Martha claims) would be happier if she were “out of the picture.” Mr. Jeter’s best moments achieve comedy without strain, sometimes ever so subtly at Martha’s expense. She tells us that soon after arriving in Washington, her mouth began getting her attention from newspapers: “And not just the society pages.”

It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in Martha Mitchell’s company. This is a credit above all to Judith Ivey. She imparts Martha’s sometimes ugly views with a pretty smile, and inexorably wins you over. The role demands that she switch from seething rage to sunny cheer to shattered terror, and she does. Martha claimed that she was “a political prisoner.” Mr. Jeter shows her on the day the Watergate break-in occurred. From California, she has called her pal Helen Thomas to dish about one of the burglars when the door bursts open, and five men (unseen by us) rough her up. The administration claimed this was all a delusion and used her complaints to discredit her; Mr. Jeter gives us no reason to think it was anything but real.

Director Margaret Whitton does a nimble job of blending old newsreels and photographs into the action, as well as live video shots of Ms. Ivey talking to banks of TV cameras. Still the play flattens here and there. The trouble lies in the show’s conceit. Martha is not telling us a story directly, or addressing us as an audience, the way Tovah Feldshuh and Jefferson Mays do in their solo shows. Mr. Jeter has her speaking to her tape recorder, reducing all of us to mere eavesdroppers. “If Martha Mitchell comes up missing, let this serve as a record of the truth, and an indictment of the guilty,” she tells her plastic amanuensis. A paradox: By having Martha speak to a tape recorder, and not speak directly to the audience – that is, by doing the “realistic” thing – the show seems all the more artificial.

Nor is the play helped by its use of so many cliches of solo stagecraft. When the plot needs a little boost, the phone propitiously rings; when it’s time for a new topic, Martha will pick up a newspaper, and the front-page headline will magically jog her memory. The play could also do without her last-minute homily. “Americans have been far too trusting of our government. Hell I was the same way till I saw how it all works,” she intones.

The real service of Mr. Jeter’s play comes from dramatizing that message, not preaching it. Leave aside its excesses and occasional false steps: “Dirty Tricks” is a 90-minute jolt to the memory, and a warning to the imagination. Martha’s husband, the attorney general of the United States, really did spend 19 months in jail for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying under oath. Estranged from him, Martha really did die of cancer in 1976, without friends or family at her bedside, and an anonymous friend really did send a display of white chrysanthemums to her funeral. “MARTHA WAS RIGHT,” it said. And in 1972, after Woodward and Bernstein had already begun publishing the stories that would soon bring him down, Richard Nixon really did win 49 states in his bid for re-election – all but Massachusetts.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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