Stuff Happens with Debra Winger, Len Cariou et al.....

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/19/04 at 2:42am

I saw the all-star reading of "Stuff Happens" by David Hare which opened the Tribeca Theatre Festival tonight at New York Theatre Workshop. The show, currently running in the West End, has been called the "Event" of the London theatre season, a docu-play concerning the events leading up to the war in Iraq, told from the perspective of the main parties involved -- Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Blair, Blix, and the rest of the usual suspects (this reading, I believe marked the US debut of the controversial drama).

Hare has "assembled" the play using the public record, various private accounts from some of the parties involved, as well as, in the case of certain closed door meetings, his best authorial guesses for how the actual conversations played out, to construct a panoramic view of the last three and half years of international machinations which have to the current state of the world. Internal perspectives from the Bush administration, the Blair administration, Blix, Tenant, as well as within the Iraqi world are represented by Hare in an effort to explicate how all of us in America, Britain and the rest of the world have gotten ourselves into the current mess that is the Iraq War.

While Hare is clearly approaching the subject from a British left wing point of view, much of the play consists of actual quotes from the participants at the center of the storm, so while charges of bias are inevitable, the play is hardly a "Fahrenheit 911" view of the world -- Hare's take is far more evenhanded and decidedly has too much of an international thrust to be lumped in with the Moore film. Nonetheless, Hare's critique of the Bush adminstration's failings in the march to war and its failures in diplomacy are quite potent.

It must be said that for those of us who have been really paying attention for the last four years and have read the accounts of the internal goings-on of these figures in Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty" (about Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill), Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" and Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack" -- and several others -- "Stuff Happens" has almost nothing new or insightful or surprising to say about the Bush and Blair administrations or the current state of affairs. The quotes, the one-liners, the conversations etc... are all memorable snippets that have been trotted out dozens of times in editorials, ads, articles and in pieces on the "Daily Show" over the last few years. And Hare's inventions of those conversations which haven't been made public are rather perfunctory and not terribly illuminating.

Ultimately, I felt I didn't quite get what the big deal about this piece was. The National Theatre production of it has received an extraordinary amount of attention from the world press (not all of it positive) as if it's a landmark in the history of political theatre. Stripped of any fancy production values (tonight's presentation was simply a reading with a stage full of very talented actors in street clothes seated on chairs with music stands used to hold their scripts), the play struck me as a rather generic recitation of the facts most of us know about what got us into the current mess in Iraq. It's the sort of thing that Moises Kaufmann has done with "Gross Indecency" and "The Laramie Project," but lacking a real authorial perspective to shape and focus the raw material.

Too much of this play felt, to me, like one of those unremarkable documentaries one sees occasionally that intermixes real, interesting archival footage with scenes of actors portraying the real historical characters that are the subject of the documentary doing archly written monologues and re-enacting scenes for which no actual footage was available. There's really nothing in "Stuff Happens" that 60 Minutes, PBS' Frontline, or other similar documentary series don't do better on a weekly basis. There just isn't anything particularly notable about Hare's writing (and editing and assembling) here and without the formidable impramatur of the National Theater, one wonders whether it would have caused such a stir in London that would have brought out such a stellar cast for last night's reading. Still, given the importance and primacy of the events depicted to recent history and the ongoing significance they have to the many days ahead, I guess there's nothing wrong in having a play that coherently lays out so many of the important, but sometimes overlooked facts of the recent past.

It wouldn't be fair to in any way evaluate the performance of any of the actors in this reading considering there was probably close to no rehearsal for this presentation (though some clearly spent more time preparing than others -- John Benjamin Hickey was damned near off book as Tony Blair in some scenes, as was Reg E. Cathey as Colin Powell). I do want to include the list of them though, alphabetically:

Firdous Bamji, Reed Birney, Lothaire Bluteau, Len Cariou, Reg E. Cathey, John Ellison Conlee, Brandon Demery, John Guare, John Benjamin Hickey, Arliss Howard, Dariush Kashani, Christopher McCann, Donald Moffat, Gloria Reuben, Wallace Shawn, Fisher Stevens, Michael Stuhlbarg, Debra Winger, and Frank Wood.

Updated On: 10/19/04 at 02:42 AM

[JakeB]

Posted: 10/19/04 at 2:53am

If you take a look at the production pictures, actually all they seem to do is sit around and read off 'music stands'!
The National Theatre production of Stuff Happens

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 10/19/04 at 3:31am

Good point.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 10/19/04 at 9:35am

I wish that the U.S. had something as good as The National Theatre...

...and the Royal Shakespeare Company...

...and Judi Dench

...and Fortnum & Masons

I think I'm moving to London.