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"Stuff
happens ... freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes
and commit crimes and do bad things."
"This ain't no Vietnam/We will win Iraq." David Hare's Stuff Happens exists in a kind of netherworld in the Spring of 2006. Originally produced in 2004 by London's National Theatre and finally arriving in New York just now after various stops around the country, it is too old for its ripped-from-the-headlines approach to be prescient, but it is not yet old enough to have acquired the weight of any significant historical relevance of its own. As a stand-alone work, this Stuff's as old as yesterday's news. Yet, it is far from obsolete or irrelevant; when Hare is able to set aside his forays into op-ed rantings and dead-end sidebars into agit-prop leftie lecturing, Stuff Happens succeeds as an effective and at times fascinating interface with current events -- a sort of call-and-response with today's news. Taking as its premise the "unfinished business" of Vietnam that has festered in the psyches of 1960s young Turks Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney for more than three decades, Stuff draws upon a mix of public fact and playwright's speculation in chronicling the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq, 2001-03. Director Daniel Sullivan's solid and eerily-emulative cast is anchored by a spot-on Jay O. Sanders as George W. Bush. Sanders shapes the odd physical tics and frat-boy smirkiness of GWB into an entity that reaches well beyond the easy Saturday Night Live-level buffoonery the capacity Public Theater crowd seemed to come expecting at a recent preview performance into a presence much fuller, and much more disturbing. "Right now I should be in a bar in Texas, not in the Oval Office," Sanders' Bush comments to his staff shortly after his first-term inauguration. "There is only one reason I am in the Oval Office, and not a bar. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer." As embodied by the imposing Sanders, Bush is a man utterly convinced he has been placed in this position at this time in history by God. God has chosen him -- a drunken, four-time failed businessman -- for this role, and Sanders imbues Bush with a resultant serenity that supersedes GWB's trademark denseness. Sanders' Bush is a man possessed of the sublime conviction that the end game has already been decreed and decided by a Higher Power, as has his own role in it, and so he is content to let his underlings bicker and dicker over the details. Why bother with all this talk, talk, talk. God speaks directly to George, and when the time comes, George is certain God will show him the true way. For members of the Presidential staff not blessed with the comfort of divine selection, most notably Secretary of State Powell, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, Iraq was really all about Vietnam, about obliterating that deep, nagging scar of national shame, of righting the humiliating legacy of America's only wartime "defeat." For America's sole steadfast ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, this was a more secular call of destiny -- an opportunity to reshape the future of the Middle East in a progressive, humanist fashion, and with it, the fate and direction of the 21st-century. "I did not join the Labour Party to join a party of protest," Blair states early on. "I joined it as a party of government and I will make sure it is a party of government." When Hare isn't trapped in a self-devised structural prison of cursory, presentational sound-bite theater that confines a substantial portion of his play to a frenetic swirl of musical chairs, he senses the components for Shakespearean-level high drama, and in several extended, scintillating passages, maximizes this to its fullest impact and brilliance, while never letting slip the anchor of three-dimensional personas that lies beneath all actions. Rumsfeld, described as the "towel-snapper" in this locker room of plotters, is given a jovially hubristic presence by Jeffrey de Munn. Yet, even here, Hare admirably resists succumbing to easy caricature. It is difficult not to feel some resonance in Rumsfeld's disdain of his self-described "Old Europe" late in the play when he rants, "What can you say about these people in Europe except that they live their lives under the American umbrella? Every time it rains they come running for shelter. And they still think they are entitled to say, 'Hey, you're not holding that umbrella right'." Most sinister in this pack of conspirators is Gloria Reuben's Condoleeza Rice. Hovering always around the periphery, ubiquitous, wraithlike, Reuben's Condi is a kind of Lady Macbeth-in-waiting, a self-described "filter" who "distills" incoming information for her language-challenged President as she surreptitiously steers and guides conversations and policy meetings to her own murky ends. Constantly fretting across The Pond, Byron Jennings' Blair is more Washington's chump than eager lapdog, a man of largely noble intent who is ultimately shafted and shunted aside by the shifting allegiances of Bush's minions, most notably Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, played as a taciturn, calculating thug by Zach Grenier. But it is Powell (Peter Francis James) who is Hare's true tragic hero. Gulf War I commander, diplomat and humanist, Powell is above and beyond all else "the good soldier" to his deluded commander-in-chief, and who is ultimately deflated, denounced and destroyed because of it. Powell's dilemma interests Hare most, reflected in the play's two most powerful (and sustained) scenes -- the first act closer between Bush and Powell that begins as a polite, almost formal chat and builds into an explosive confrontation as Powell's frustration and anger at his betrayal and out-maneuvering by Rumsfeld & Co. spills over; and Powell's later meeting with French diplomat Dominique De Vellipin (a star turn by Robert Sella) at the Hotel Pierre in New York in which the two thrust and parry in sparkling diplomatic subtext over UN resolutions and the true nature of American intentions. When Hare steps out of the positioning and posturing of the Oval Office and attempts to place the plotting and scheming in a larger context, Stuff stalls and stumbles. An early rant by an "Angry Journalist" comes out of nowhere and serves no overarching purpose; the "Palestinian Academic"'s harangue that opens the second act spins its wheels and goes nowhere, and the play's unfortunate coda, in which an "Iraqi Exile" basically calls everyone one in the room a fucking idiot, is especially patronizing, considering its white, Western Anglo bourgeois source (Hare) that assumes he can "tell it like it is" from an Iraqi viewpoint to a predominately white, Western Anglo bourgeois audience. Stuff is strongest when Hare allows his characters the freedom to plot and scheme on their own; it does not require someone coming out at the end and explaining the "point" of it all. ******* Taken at face value, Stuff Happens might seem better titled, Stuff Happened: Yeah, So What? from both the familiarity of its content and the gradual growing (American) public awareness in the past two years of this Administration's unprecedented, incompetent hubris. Yet, as prelude, Hare's incisive "faction" of recent history remains relevant in its continuing dovetailing interface with today's news: the growing military revolt against Rumsfeld, Powell's recent concession that he well knew before the fact that the content of his career-ending WMD speech to the UN was a lie and fabrication; in Iraq, the daily reports of mounting "sectarian violence," which, less euphemistically, is also known for what it really is: Civil War -- the American-spawned debacle that is right now slowly but surely tearing that country apart. "If you go into Iraq, you're going to be the proud owner of 25 million people," Hare's Powell cautions Bush after discovering his true agenda. "Their lives. All their hopes and aspirations. All their problems. Has anyone begun to think about that?" If Powell did before shelving his ethical and moral standing to become just another Bush lackey, he was alone on the team. Rumsfeld, intoxicated with the power of his own unbridled incompetence, certainly didn't. Nor did Cheney, whose stock options in Halliburton increased from less than $250,000 in 2004 to more than $8 million today. Nor Wolfowitz, nor Condi, nor Blair. And certainly not George W. Bush, who, obliviously serene in his role as God's divine messenger, continues to position for the Rapture as he relentlessly drives both America and the Middle East into the ground. But 2006 is an election year in US, and not everyone can afford to be so sublimely detached from reality. Republicans both incumbent and aspiring are seeing their 12-year stranglehold on American government rapidly hemorrhaging away and they are desperately trying to stop the bleeding. Accordingly, sometime between now and November someone is going to say to Bush what the late Sen. George Aiken said to Lyndon Johnson as Vietnam sank into its untenable quagmire in the mid-60s: "the best policy is to declare victory and leave." And, ultimately, leaving Iraq is what America will do, declare "victory" and bail out and go home again and shut its doors and pull its shades and feverishly nurse yet another festering national wound. Left behind will be those 25 million Iraqis, left to fend for themselves in the inevitable vacuum of mad, murderous chaos created by a cabal of American incompetents who had never been to war but thought they knew how to win one. Left behind in the ruins of their own ravaged country, with all the "liberation" candy bars long handed out, Iraqis will be left with yet another parting American shrug and a "hey, really sorry abut how it all turned out, but, you know, stuff happens." "Stuff
Happens" Copyright © 2006 by theater2k.com. All rights reserved. |
