David Frost (Alan Cox) and Tricky Dick (Stacy Keach) square off in Frost/Nixon. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

At his Election-Eve chat at the Birchmere, Henry Rollins considered the post-presidential role of one George W. Bush. In Rollins's speculative, Bergman-movie vision of the Bushes' Golden years, they occupy a swank Houston condo, their suites situated on opposite sides of the long dining room where they take their silent meals together, the air so thick with tension it scares the help. Of course, pundits with loftier credentials than those of a punk singer-turned-storyteller will probably weigh in on this topic. Who is Hank Rollins to say what will happen to our sad president, whose nature and motives have already been examined by some of the sharpest journalistic minds of our generation? In such matters, Rollins is, as he freely admits, a lightweight.

I mention it only because that's more or less what the world was saying 30 years ago about David Frost, the down-on-his-luck British chat-show host who in 1977 achieved what elected officials and hard-news journalists before him couldn't: He got Richard Milhous Nixon, who shared W.'s decidedly un-conservative view of presidential authority, to repent his crimes in office (more or less) before a television audience of 400 million. "I let down the country," came the tortured admission. "I let down our system of government, and the dreams of all those young people who ought to get into government but who now will think it's all too corrupt and the rest."

The whys and wherefores of Frost's unlikely "get" are the business of Frost/Nixon, a play by Peter Morgan that premiered in London a couple of Augusts ago, won Frank Langella a Tony for his performance as Nixon on Broadway last year, and has now landed at the Kennedy Center in a sparkling touring production with Stacy Keach as the disgraced former president. Keach so captures the weight of Nixon's intellect and self-pity on his broad shoulders that it doesn't much matter how un-Nixonian he looks, and Alan Cox's oily but likeable Frost matches him point for point. So does Morgan's wholly absorbing play: Barreling along for two intermission-free hours, it unfolds like a fight film, establishing Frost as its underdog challenger, following him through his training and preparation, and then giving us the title bout itself: a compression of the 30 hours of interviews Nixon sat for over a period of 12 days.

For both men, nothing less than their credibility was at stake. (Frost gambled his financial security, too, essentially paying Nixon's $600,000 fee out of his own pocket when sponsors proved reluctant to pony up.) Frost may have begun the project with no loftier a goal than to rekindle his waning celebrity, but somewhere along the way, he begins to understand that to extract some measure of contrition from Nixon was necessary to restore the faith of an newly cynical body politic. Nixon, meanwhile, saw Frost as a vain rube whom he could manipulate into helping him rehabilitate his image and clear a path for his return from public exile.

Stacy Keach, the New Mike Hammer his own bad self, gets his Nixon on. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

Frost/Nixon never loses its sense of the stakes, but never feels stodgy or self-important, either. Jon Driscoll's efficient set hangs a bank of video screens above the otherwise uncluttered stage. These display live two-camera closeups of the two men during the interview segments, and use quick video clips to place us mid-70s London and later, Southern California (and also to cover the scene changes).

Director Michael Grandage's use of video is ingenious and unobtrusive, but doesn't quite solve the problem that the Kennedy Center's 1,122-seat Eisenhower Theatre is simply too cavernous a room for a show wherein the most dramatic moments consist of two guys seated across from each other in push chairs. Frost/Nixon would be a perfect fit for a smaller house, like Studio's Metheny Theatre, or even the Kennedy Center's own 475-seat Terrace Theatre. It's fair to mention because, well, you'll have the option of seeing Ron Howard's movie version, starring Broadway principals Langella and Michael Sheen, in a couple of weeks.

Even so, Frost/Nixon is a pure creation for the theater, in no small part because it's so much about the live battle of wills between two men with so much to lose. Watching them them scrap hand-to-hand for small bits of moral turf is fascinating: 20 years before President William Jefferson Clinton dissembled, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," Nixon parsed with Frost the exact definition of the word "Watergate."

Perhaps Morgan's cleverest touch is to give each of the two combatants a partisan narrator who addresses the audience directly. For Frost, it's his chief researcher, James Reston, Jr. Brian Sgamati exudes an idealistic zeal in the role, declaring, "I want to give him the trial he never had." (Morgan also finds a way of acknowledging Nixon's many laudable accomplishments as President, if only by having Reston and his cohorts fret his opening of relations with China or creation of the Environmental Protection Agency will shift viewers' sympathy to Nixon's side if they let him run on about them too much.) Nixon, meanwhile, gets his Chief of Staff, Jack Brennan, played by Ted Koch. Neither performance is as layered as those of Keach and Cox in the title roles, but both men fill out their supporting roles ably.

The resonance of Nixon's crimes with the Bush administration's myriad abuses are impossible to ignore, of course, so neither Morgan nor Grandage belabor the point. They just let their actors get on with their noble work of bringing a fascinating chapter of recent American history to vibrant, contentious life.

Frost/Nixon is at the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theatre through Nov. 30. The show runs two hours without an intermission. Tickets are available here.