MOULDY: After a year spent fulfilling a childhood dream by writing plotlines for Hulk Hogan and the rest of the World Championship Wrestling universe, Bob Mould is back to his day job: writing scads of endearingly pop-infused, smashingly loud love songs. The post-punk icon, formerly of Husker Du and Sugar, hasn’t had an album out since 1998’s solo The Last Dog and Pony Show (Ryko); he’s since formed his own label, Granary Music, which will release not one but three Mould discs this year. If you go to his Web site, www.granarymusic.com, you can hear a radio commercial for the first of these, Modulate (due March 12), complete with Mould doing his best booming, wrestling-style-announcer voiceover. And to support the disc, Mould’s heading out on a tour he’s christened the "Carnival of Light and Sound," which hits the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Mass Ave, in Boston, on April 13. Call (617) 931-2000 for tickets.
THE ART OF STORYTELLING: Mercurial Scottish fey-pop overlords Belle and Sebastian have continued to put out singles and EPs at an alarming rate, which has allowed them the luxury of leaving some of their best material off their occasional full-length albums — they’re still the kind of band you find yourself discovering over and over again. Now they’ve found the perfect vehicle: they composed the soundtrack for Todd Solondz’s latest film, Storytelling, and an album — featuring music from the soundtrack as well as some newer material — is due out May 5. The band will make a rare stateside tour to support the disc with a stop at the Orpheum, One Hamilton Place, in Boston, on May 4. Call (617) 931-2000 for tickets.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Tricky redux
Monica Lewinsky and Henry Kissinger are both remembered for making history on their knees. The precise nature of the service Lewinsky rendered her president is now a matter of public record. Kissinger’s case is more murky. The then–secretary of state concedes that he served his commander in chief privately and in a capacity more personal than his position demanded on the eve of Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation. Neither he nor Tricky Dick, however, ever revealed the particulars of their meeting that night. The two may or may not have prayed together on bended knee, as Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi did spoofing the encounter on a Saturday Night Live skit that was historic in more ways than one.
The suspicion that the SNL sketch has somehow supplanted the sketchy facts of actual history in the memories of some Americans worries the author of Nixon’s Nixon, a surreal political satire that premiered Off Broadway in 1995 and opens next weekend at the Huntington Theatre Company. Playwright Russell Lees would have more reason to worry if there were something specifically at odds with recorded history in his imagined rendition of the encounter — a mix of fact, informed conjecture, and sharp comedy. Still, Lees takes every precaution, amplifying the warning he issues in the preface of his script.
"My play is conjecture," he says. "Nobody really knows what happened the night Nixon and Kissinger got together the night before the resignation. Nobody even knows why. They didn’t even like each other or trust each other. Some people speculate Kissinger acted out of loyalty. When I decided to play with the idea that he was trying protect his job, I was just guessing. I didn’t get his motive from any historical source. I just invented it because it seemed dramatically interesting."
Because Nixon and Kissinger never revealed much about the meeting, adds Lees, "I wasn’t nailed to hard historical fact. I felt free to have fun with the plot, to let go and let it run." Indeed, the plot takes some fantastic turns, ands ends in full-blown surrealism.
Lees keeps his characters on a shorter leash. "My aim was to make them plausible. Kissinger and Nixon were powerful but fragile men, and their meeting took place at a very intense time in history. They were outsized characters, with lots of dramatic weight. Seymour Hersh’s The Price of Power helped me with Kissinger. To me, he was the more duplicitous of the two. Nixon was a fighter, but he was less successful at fashioning a façade."
In Nixon’s Nixon, the president and his secretary of state face off like poker players with different strategies and strengths. "Throughout his career," Lees observes, "Nixon made comeback after comeback. He didn’t want to resign. He wanted to hang on, even in the face of impeachment." To convince him to fold, the Kissinger of the play intimates at every opportunity that clinging to power will compromise his legacy. When the president veers from the quandaries of the moment to muse on the triumphs of his past, Kissinger plays along but manipulates memory to his own ends.
Ultimately, however, Lees’s Nixon looks to the past in an effort to find an idea of himself he can live with. "At one point in the play," says Lees, "Kissinger rants at Nixon for spending all his time listening to the tapes of his presidency, trying to find an inner, more honorable Nixon. In a way, that’s what I’m trying to do in the play. I’m trying to find a better Nixon than the one we have."
Nixon’s Nixon will be presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue, in Boston, March 1 through 31. Tickets are $12 to $58; call (617) 266-0800.
BY ANNE MARIE DONAHUE
