Stuff Happens

Mrs. CaliBlogger and I had the good fortune to be invited to a preview of David Hare's drama Stuff Happens, which is seeing its American premier at the Mark Taper Forum in LA (a nice perk for working in the business).

The play, which features the main players of BushCorp™, as well as various other key international figures, is made up almost entirely of documented transcripts and press pronouncements by the characters involved, with relatively little, though hilariously acidic, speculations on what was going on behind the scenes.

From the program:

Stuff Happens is a history play, which happens to center on very recent history. The events within it have been authenticated from multiple sources, both private and public. What happened happened. Nothing in the narrative is knowingly untrue. Scenes of direct address quote people verbatim. When the doors close on the world's leaders and on their entourages, then I have used my imagination. This is surely a play, not a documentary, and driven, I hope, by its themes as much as by its characters and story. - David Hare

Stuff Happens refers to Donald Rumsfeld's glib pronouncement during the looting of Baghdad following the fall of Saddam's regime. The remark characterizes the flippant attitude many of the major US players had towards the aftermath of the US victory over Saddam's forces, with the horrific results we continue to read about daily.

The story itself, which traces BushCorp™ activities from the administration's beginning through the fall of Baghdad, is well known to anyone who's been paying close attention, though I suspect that much of the play's intent is to educate those who weren't.

It also illuminates subtleties left from most press accounts.

The most sympathetic characters are Colin Powell (a brilliant Tyrees Allen) and Tony Blair (a somewhat horse Julian Sands).

In Hare's vision Powell has the thankless task of the lone voice of reason in an administration hell-bent on war with Iraq. In one of the play's most powerful scenes, Powell makes an impassioned plea to Bush (whose chief attribute, as played by Keith Carradine, is unerring self-satisfaction) on the need for International, and specifically UN backing for any military venture in Iraq. Bush is finally convinced, though not from any true interest in seeing a peaceful resolution, but only because the UN might provide political cover.

Blair, on the other hand becomes trapped, both by his own inclination to follow the Clintonian ideal of war for humanitarian purposes, and his need to maintain the US alliance. Time and again he seems defeated both by Bush's bland obliqueness, as well Rumsfeld's (a stand-out performance by John Michael Higgins) impolitic pronouncements.

Other notable performances are by Jane Carr (as Laura Bush, and especially as a grieving mother), Dakin Matthews (whose gruff, and occasionally profane pronouncements nail Cheney), Stephen Spinella (whose French Foreign Minister Villepin expresses the European distrust of BushCorp™'s sudden interest in the UN during the run-up to war), and Alan Oppenheimer (as a bemused Hans Blix)

Of special note is the performance by Jay Harik, who plays various minor roles throughout the production, but whose play ending plea invites a chilling comparison between Bush and Saddam. Speaking as an Iraqi citizen, Harik expresses his own people's guilt in allowing Saddam to remain in power ( questionable assertion, but it works in the play). But his point is made: the quality of a nation's leadership is ultimately the responsibility of the nation's people. And the sad implication is that, in George W. Bush, the United States has chosen just the leader it deserves.

[x-posted at Daily Kos]