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

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 30, 2006

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.

For all the intrigue and backbiting in "Stuff Happens," the most intense struggle is the one between Powell and himself. "What the hell is this?" Hare has Powell shouting in frustration late in the play as his efforts are stymied to negotiate United Nations resolutions on Iraq and thereby avoid war. "I've got a bunch of right-wing nut cases in the White House, I've got the treacherous French in the Security Council. I'm standing in the [expletive] road! And the [expletive] is all flowing one way!"

Powell verbatim? No. An accurate reflection of how he felt? Hare says he's done extensive research, held on- and off-the-record talks with many people and read more than 50 books on the subject. No one, he adds, has discounted any of the events in "Stuff Happens" -- not even a scene in which Blair complains to Bush that British special forces were told by the United States to back off after they located Osama bin Laden. The play posits that the bungling Americans wanted that glorious kill for themselves. (Hare also refuses to reveal which figure portrayed in the work inquired about playing himself.)

The playwright takes pains to explain that his goal was not to provide a one-sided indictment, a la the propagandistic documentary style of Michael Moore, a filmmaker he nonetheless admires. Hare (author of "Plenty" and "Amy's View") says he was more interested in exploring the interplay of power, favor, loyalty -- elements of classic historical drama.

"I'm going the Shakespearean route, that this is living history," Hare says during an interview in a conference room at the theater complex in downtown Manhattan.

"I've guessed at what happened when the doors closed, and I've guessed on the basis of good evidence," says Hare, 58. "It's an imaginative version of what actually happened. My best guess."

"Stuff Happens" was first produced in London, at the Royal National Theatre, nearly two years ago, and was presented last year in Los Angeles. And although the New York Theater Workshop conducted a well-publicized staged reading in 2004, Hare had a hard time getting a full-fledged production in Manhattan. Part of the problem might have been the reception to the play: Writing of the London original in the New York Times, Ben Brantley called it "only fitfully involving." (His review of the revised New York version was more favorable.) Many speaking parts, and the salaries they require, were perhaps another impediment.

Oskar Eustis, who heads the Public Theater, took on the project, with some backing from outside producers. It has been directed by Daniel Sullivan in a space redesigned to cut an audience in two, one half sitting on each side of the action. The configuration reminds a spectator of other kinds of divisions. "For me," Eustis says, "it was only a question of: Can we assemble the resources to do it?"

Hare says he's rewritten extensively. His goal has been beefing up scenes out of his imagination, over those that merely replicate events. "The fun of the play is the invented scenes," he says. "The boring point is the documentary material."

Since the London debut, it's the role of Powell that seems to have evolved most powerfully. And the scene in which the retired general must go before the U.N. Security Council -- with evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that Hare suggests Powell knows was faulty -- is a crux of the play.

"In London," the playwright says, "he was a liberal hero. Now, he's a tragic hero."

James, who plays Powell, says he can sense the audience's engagement with the former secretary of state, its desire that Powell be an embodiment of skepticism about the war. "I can feel a resistance in the audience when Powell does something to the 'right' of where they want to be," he says.

The challenge for James has been a little more nuanced: He happens to have met Powell, as a result of being in a play -- a revival of "On Golden Pond" -- with Powell's daughter, Linda. Oddly enough, he ran into her on the day he was to audition for "Stuff Happens."

"She said: 'I know where you are going. You're going to read to be my daddy,' " he recounts.

Hare had hopes that "Stuff Happens" would find a home in Washington, where he very much wants to see it produced. But, he claims, there were no takers among theater folk in the nation's capital: He asserts he was told it was because of financial considerations, that a theater's funding could be jeopardized.

"It's been a crucible to get this play done in America," he says. "It's not been easy."