Stuff is still happening, but who cares?

Very strange that the L.A. Times and the national media in general should give so little attention to the American premiere of David Hare's play Stuff Happens. It opened about a week ago at the Taper in L.A. and the Times gave it a very positive review, but minimal space at the bottom of the page in Calendar that devoted most of its real estate to some trendy designers of ridiculously decadent women's clothes. The reviewer was not even a Times staffer, but merely a stringer who had seen the play, as we have, in its original London production and could make knowledgeable comparisons about set design and performances, but was entirely disinclined to write about the play's themes, social significance, or central political debate.

This is a piece of high impact theatre that takes its audience directly to the heart of the issues most pressing on our national consciousness, and the Times, local television, CNN, NPR are giving it less coverage than they would a touring production of the Music Man. Admittedly, the play hasn't made an appearance in New York, so it naturally wouldn't pick up any of the Tony awards' media spotlight, which, of course, was so generously focused on Monty Python's latest silliness called Spamalot. But then serious theatre, not surprisingly, often skips Broadway. It's a definite honor that Hare's play should come first to Los Angeles, but logical and well-deserved for director Gordon Davidson's final project at the Center Theatre Group.

In case you don't know what the work is about, it is a history play that presents in brilliant detail the story of how the U.S. and Britain became bound together in the enterprise of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq for its own good and our own glory. The title comes from an early post-invasion press conference of Donald Rumsfeld's where he writes off the looting and chaos that followed "liberation" with his famously nonchalant "Hey, stuff happens..."

Hare depicts Rummy and all the other public figures--George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix, the whole array of French diplomats, and more--as characters in this huge tragedy of hubris and arrogance. Their lines are a blend of words on the public record and, when no record exists, those imagined by the author for meetings that actually took place.

It is an extremely provocative piece of theatre--especially for Americans seeing it in Britain a month before the U.S. presidential election--but not as slanted or one-sided as the summary above might lead us to assume. Hare's meticulous research and even-handed approach creates a very objective record of how it all unfolded in the period between the opening days of the Bush administration, when cabinet meetings focused on maps of Iraq and very little on issues of terrorism, through to the declared finish of "major combat." All sides of the issues are given voice and we are taken to the inside of the diplomacy and decision making process that got us where we are today.

It is a powerful story that seemed to affect the two audiences we've been a part of very differently. In London, at the National Theatre, the audience was thoroughly engrossed and clearly moved, but they allowed the whole work to be presented before taking the discussion onward to the lobby and beyond, but in the L.A. the audience was from the start prone to taking sides and expressing their disapproval or support for the figures on stage--through hissing, booing, whistling, applauding, talking back aloud to the actors--as if they were unaware of the difference between art and life. It was an experience we'd never had before in a professional commercial production and at one point brought an actress delivering a monologue as an anonymous Palestinian commentator to an abrupt halt while audience members alternately shouted, shushed, and wrangled over first what she was saying and then over how to behave in the theatre.

After nearly 40 years of active theatre going both here and in the UK, we have our opinions about what accounts for the difference in audience reaction, but the bigger issue is that this is a play that is timely and so well-crafted that it really wakes people up. So why is this being ignored? The Taper advertising seems rather minimal, and we got our tickets on a special discount deal that seemed to indicate little confidence in the play's power to attract audiences for its 6-week run.

The unfortunate fact is that what's going on in Iraq has dropped off this country's radar screen. Somehow we've realized the situation is a hopeless morass, but as opposed to the previous hopeless morass of Vietnam, we have lost the stomach for confronting the problem and lack the energy for protest. To have a nation actually discussing the facts that Hare brings back to our attention would be deeply disturbing, but would eventually ignite political reaction. We instead seem content to keep our heads buried in "reality" television and leave the dying and suffering to the relatively few who have volunteered for it.

But those are just the people who can't be expected to discontinue their investment in this failing enterprise. Once you've lost a son or daughter, an arm or a leg, you aren't likely to turn back and admit you've been sacrificed for someone else's folly. It's the rest of us, though, who can still be somewhat objective, who still have the luxury of reading discomforting analysis and not blinking, or of going to live theatre without blinding pre-judgments who must at least make enough commotion to get back into the headlines.

Stuff is still happening, and we're being told that if we just are patient and believe in the wisdom of our current policy makers, that eventually it will stop happening and we can go home again secure in the belief that democracy is rooted, nurtured and blossoming in the heart of the world's least reasonable, least cooperative territories.

The big problem is that our main purpose in "doing Iraq," as the neocons put it, was to showcase American power and efficiency--"shock and awe" they call it--as a shortcut to the hard work of international diplomacy. We figured that the real trouble spots in the Middle East and Asia were too chancy to engage with, but that we could slap around a petty brute like Saddam much more easily and effectively whether there was any real threat or not. Now that that approach has been exposed as a ruse and proven untenable anyway, we are left with a simple choice: either we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate without further provocation or justification to our enemy or we plod on, losing more soldiers and fueling the opposition for another six to ten years before we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate.

It's a rotten choice, but it appears to be all that we've got. We didn't want to face it in 1975 and we'd rather not face it now, but unless something counteracts the administration's ability to deny and deflect attention, the decision will be made by default and we'll just have to accept the defense that "Stuff happens."