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Ivana Reviews Stuff Happens at The Public Theater

"Stuff happens," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld following a looting in Iraq in 2003 during a conference as well as during David Hare's play of the same name. Stuff Happens has finally reached the liberal hands of New Yorkers at The Public Theatre, where it has been welcomed with an extended run.

In the opening scene of this political play, which speculates on the events leading up to the war in Iraq, a swarm of smartly dressed politicians appear on stage. After Rumsfeld, effectively portrayed by Jeffrey de Munn, makes his famously blunt and simplistic statement, a few of Rumsfeld's old colleagues suggest that he has a belligerent nature. One man describes him "in locker-room terms [as] a towel-snapper." Then, Condoleezza Rice, played by the soft-spoken Gloria Reuben, comes on stage, and she is said to keep two mirrors in her office, "one to keep an eye on her front and one for her back." These phrases, among others, set the tone of the play and present the American politicians as exactly that -- politicians. Throughout the play, Hare manages to sneak in snippy comments about each of these characters while depicting Tony Blair and Colin Powell as the "good guys." This liberal bias was hardly a problem for the audience as it chuckled softly at the clever quips and heartily guffawed at the obvious jokes about the inarticulate President Bush and the vagueness of a "War on Terrorism."

Yet, Stuff Happens is not just a history play. Instead, it shrewdly seeks to find out under what circumstances the United States invaded Iraq. Surprisingly, the 9/11 attacks are barely mentioned throughout the play except in one disturbing scene, when the theatre fills with the sounds of airplanes overhead. More importantly though, Hare tries to show how and why George W. Bush was able to outsmart the infinitely more persuasive Tony Blair and get his way. While Jay O. Sanders saunters out into the stage, the audience immediately smiles as he opens his mouth and a drawling Texan accent pours out. We laugh enthusiastically as he tells us, "I feel like God wants me to be President...he wants me to go into Iraq and get Saddam [Hussein]." But besides the religious epithets, for most of the play Bush would offer mere words of agreement with whatever had just been said by his advisors, or he would twist whatever his colleagues had said into questions. We can never tell what Bush himself is thinking -- or isn't thinking -- but somehow, behind the façade of inanity, Bush is a cunning man, and we see this in the distress he causes his closest supporter in the war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Byron Jennings's performance as Blair was admirable and emotionally gripping as he endlessly tortured himself in trying to maintain loyalty to the U.S. while facing great opposition from the Parliament and dishonesty Bush. Colin Powell, played by Peter Francis James, is also depicted as a tormented character. Behind the scenes, he's the odd man out. While "Condi," as Hare so fondly has everyone call her, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney (Zach Grenier) and Paul Wolfowitz (David Pittu), are all up for war, Powell comes off as a conscientious objector, questioning the ambiguity inherent in the G.W.O.T (which is bluntly discussed in a hilarious behind-closed-doors scene in which Rumsfeld says "...A War on Terrorism. That's vague. With that, we can do anything!"). Instead of the quiet character that Powell seems to be in reality, Hare takes advantage of dramatic license here and in many scenes, Powell raises his voice to great decibels as he attempts to prevent the war and help Blair.

While the play frequently makes fun of the CIA, faulty intelligence and American politics, the seriousness of the issue is periodically brought to the fore, and moral questions consequently resonate throughout the rest of the play. In the first act, an angry journalist (Robert Sella) speaks to the audience about the inadequate evidence that the US had to go on and the overall injustice of the war. In retrospect, this scene seemed outof place and almost unnecessary, as the journalist only appeared once in the entire play. Furthermore, Sella was not convincingly angry, and he almost did not seem to know what he was talking about. On the other hand, in the second act Lameece Issaq comes out as a Palestinian academic, receiving scattered applause from the audience after she speaks about the war from the viewpoint of an innocent Middle Easterner, reminding us that Iraq is not the only country affected by the war.

At the end of the nearly three-hour production, after each American politician steps forward to state his or her opinion on the war (Rice most notably remarks, "I intend to leave my office without anyone figuring out my position on any major position"), an Iraqi exile, played effectively by Waleed F. Zuaiter, speaks from the perspective of a citizen of the invaded country, an appropriate balance for a play heavy on American and British politics. Hare's words, spoken through the Iraqi exile, are a resounding confirmation of the confusion and injustice caused by the U.S. presence in the Middle East. While Hare's is neither always fluent nor always eloquent (as Rumsfeld says, "Stuff happens" and it's as simple as that), Jennings, James and De Munn's noteworthy performances, accompanied by the rest of the commendable cast, make Hare's controversial, thought-provoking political and moral questions comprehensible to even the most ignorant.