Stuff Happens @ ACT

It's no doubt an unenviable task for a playwright to have to try to create realistic characters based on real people we see in the news day in and day out. At first, we sort of felt like all the characters were little more than caricatures of the real people, and then it occurred to us that, really, politicians are already caricatures of real people, and Hare displayed a lot of restraint, relying on what we know about the real people to fashion characters that conform, roughly, to the truth. Yes, Dick Cheney comes off as a dick, but as a dick who's straight-talking with his peers, rather than the evasive public figure we all know and love. There's a good deal of laughs to be had at Bush's tortured speech, but rather than portray him as a moron, Hare makes Bush rather more evasive and two-faced, someone who knows what he's doing (even if it was Condi who told him what that was).

The story that Hare develops is basically centered around former Secretary of State Colin Powell and now ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Powell is portrayed as an honest and decent man undercut by his boss's double-dealing and ultimately incriminated by the infamous February 5, 2003, speech he gave to the UN, making the now-discredited claims about Iraq's WMD program. Similarly, Blair is portrayed as an honest-to-goodness idealist out to remake the world for the better. He wants peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and he knows that whatever else, Saddam Hussein is a butcher and the world would be better off without him. Blair naively hitches his cart to the U.S., making pains to keep Bush in line, to force the U.S. to put pressure on Israel and guiding the U.S. towards the showdown at the UN in the wake of the infamous UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which the U.S. claimed authorized the use of force against Iraq.

The ensemble cast at ACT does some remarkable work with the raw material they're given, which leaves them wholly in the shadow of very real people whose faces and speech patterns we know all too well. Charles Dumas as Colin Powell brings gravitas to a fairly sympathetic role--Powell was, after all, the originator of the eponymous doctrine that was meant to preclude the possibility of another Vietnam by maintaining that any military action should respond exclusively to vital national security interests and should have a concrete goal to achieve as well as an exit strategy. Whether Powell was really as faultless in the affair as Hare makes him out to be will likely never be known. Powell gets the most powerful dialogue in the play, including the closing scene of the first act where he hammers down on Bush for letting Rumsfeld undercut his diplomatic work in the press, delivering such crowd-pleasing lines as, "People ask how you know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction? I say it's because we still have the receipts!" But in the end, these private interactions between Powell and other administration officials are the work of the playwright, relying on second-hand sources and hearsay.

Similarly, Mark Chamberlin does fantastic work as Tony Blair, a politician more telegenic and silver-tongued than any actor could truly do justice to. Also notable are David Pichette as the conniving French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin; Michael Winters, who gives Cheney a depth we don't see in the real world (if leaving him no more likeable); and particularly R. Hamilton Wright as George W. Bush. He does Bush's strangely cadenced and awkward speech well, making it recognizable without stooping to mockery. During several telephone calls with Blair, Wright lets Bush extend an extremely awkward silence, his face expressionless but not dumb; Wright's Bush may not be a genius, but nor is he a dullard. This Bush knows exactly what he's doing, a quality the anti-Bushies all too often ignore. After all, for all his manifest policy failures, Bush has won a lot of elections and political battles. It's not all Karl Rove.

The production in the Allen Theatre at ACT is predictably minimal. A few backdrops of the White House or Congress are almost an homage to a set. The lighting and set work is phenomenal, making good use of space. The soundtrack, though, used in the frequent scene changes, makes you feel like you're watching an episode of The West Wing. And one complaint: The actors frequently perform actual speeches that took place before Congress or the UN. Adding an echo to the actor's voice and applause following works well in Turtle Bay or D.C., but the sound designer should have looked into British politics more. Not only does Parliament meet in a relatively small room (no echo), but Blair's statements were more often than not followed by raucous booing than thundering silence.

By the time the lights came on, though, and the actors took their well-deserved bow, we were left wondering what really we were taking away. Whatever else, the central question of why--why then, why there--remains unanswered. Hare's Blair seems of two differing motivations--one to better the world by eliminating Saddam, the other to use his support of the U.S. to leverage their might to make peaces in Israel-Palestine. Towards the end, as the administration moves away from diplomacy towards a go-it-alone attitude, Cheney announces his first and foremost concern is protecting the security of the United States, but is he serious? He's after all been involved in cooking the intelligence books and earlier ascribes to Wolfowitz's case that the point is to make an example of Iraq. And what about Bush? When it comes to what Bush thinks, Hare's silence speaks to the fact that we really have no idea what Bush was thinking. Condoleeza Rice controls access to Bush, speaks for him, and--it's implied--is the voice whispering instructions in his ear. Was it Rice that persuaded Bush? Was it his own decision? What theory did he ascribe to? Did he actually believe in WMD? Did he really believe destroying Saddam would remake the Middle East? You leave the theatre no more informed than when you went in.

Ultimately, the play's power only picks up towards the end of the second act, in the mad rush to war. It's inevitable long before anyone admits it. The false diplomacy carries on for no other purpose than to give the war some legitimacy. The French accidentally provide the cover to intervene when Chirac misspeaks and implies the French will veto any resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. The British and Americans use this as an excuse to cut off diplomacy on the grounds the French are intractable. And so the death sentence for thousands of Iraqis is handed down. It's a terrible sense of déjà vu as you watch such painful events unfold before you again--it seemed so absurd back in 2003, so nonsensical what was happening in the run-up to the war, and those first few weeks bookended with Bush's aircraft carrier landing and the toppling of Saddam's statues. With four years hindsight, it's just as foolish and inexplicable; the only difference is today, we know happens next.

"Stuff Happens" plays at ACT through July 22. Tickets available online.

Photo: (left to right) R. Hamilton Wright (George W. Bush) and Michael Winters (Dick Cheney) in “Stuff Happens” by David Hare. Photo: Chris Bennion. Courtesy ACT.