Theater in the Oval

David Hare Imagines a Provocative Portrait Of the White House in the Run-Up to Iraq

NEW YORK

Although she can't know what it's like to be Condoleezza Rice, Gloria Reuben is learning a thing or two about walking in her shoes. Ferragamos, to be exact.

Every night in "Stuff Happens" -- the provocative play by David Hare that speculates on the Bush White House's closed-door planning for the war in Iraq -- the actress slips into the suit and guise of the secretary of state. "As soon as I put on that wig, with that flip," the soft-spoken Reuben says, "I'm off."

Playing a woman of such prominence and complexity, of course, is not that easy. Reuben -- who, like Rice, is a classically trained pianist -- says she worried early on that she'd never feel any emotional connection to Rice, who often leaves observers impressed yet guessing what she's really thinking. In fact, Reuben was a bit intimidated.

"I started researching and watching her, but during the first couple of weeks of rehearsals, I was scared," recalls Reuben, 41, a Toronto native who was a regular on NBC-TV's "ER." "I thought: 'I don't know what I'm going to do here. She's such an enigma, there are so many different dynamics.' "

Reuben ultimately found a center for the character by putting aside her own preconceptions and trying to understand the choices faced by Rice, who was national security adviser during the years in which "Stuff Happens" is set. The galvanizing impact of the serene, poker-faced insider conjured by Reuben has earned her critical plaudits. The production -- based partly on documented events and partly on the educated suppositions by the highly regarded British playwright -- is playing to sold-out houses at the Joseph Papp Public Theater.

"Stuff Happens" is a Washington play in every sense. Much of it is set inside the White House, in the years between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Virtually the entire roster of characters is made up of names needing no introduction: Bush (Jay O. Sanders), Dick Cheney (Zach Grenier), Donald Rumsfeld (Jeffrey DeMunn), Paul Wolfowitz (Glenn Fleshler), Colin Powell (Peter Francis James). Although many of the events encompass facts that most Americans already know, the avowedly leftist playwright also provides versions of the strategy sessions and diplomatic meetings that he can construct only through informed conjecture -- and his imagination.

The overarching thrust of "Stuff Happens" is a portrait of an administration -- led by a Bush wilier than most of his critics give him credit for -- that swaggers into a war while seemingly incapable of contemplating the consequences. Although that thesis will not strike every theatergoer as revolutionary, it's the mixing of personalities -- and the ways in which the work portrays the high-stakes psychological gamesmanship among the politicians, statesmen and strategists -- that gives it its most surprising moments.

Thus, we get a cautious Bush,

always absorbing more than he gives away; Rumsfeld, spoiling for a fight like some gung-ho linebacker;

Cheney, expressing gritted-teeth contempt for a crucial ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair (Byron Jennings); the imperious French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin (Robert Sella), behaving in high-level negotiations as if he were a sipper of Chateau Margaux among guzzlers of Bud.

And perhaps most intriguingly, there's the tense, ambiguous rivalry of Powell, the Hamlet-like then-secretary of state, and Rice, the sphinx-like national security adviser. "Stuff Happens" casts Rice as the solid sentinel, coolly sticking by the president for better or worse, and Powell as a man of conscience, an anguished fence-straddler caught between duty and the intuition that Bush's path for the country spells calamity.