ACT rendition of "Stuff Happens" takes us into war step by step

At first, every line he utters gets laughs. Then the chortles turn into scattered chuckling.

Eventually, the audience stops viewing this theatrical character as a comic purveyor of linguistic gaffes — but as the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.

This transformation must occur during "Stuff Happens" to give David Hare's topical play a center of gravity. And it does in ACT Theatre's Northwest premiere of this docudrama about how the United States got into the Iraq war, in a staging by Victor Pappas.

Perfectly calibrated is R. Hamilton Wright's performance as U.S. President George W. Bush — a lanky Texan much taller than the valued Seattle actor. But Wright nails an essential, revelatory aspect of Hare's theatrical take on Bush. Though an awkward phrasemaker, this Bush is a shrewd politician utterly assured of his executive privilege and power.

He listens intently to the impassioned post-Sept. 11 views on Iraq of his closest advisers, who here include a sour Vice President Dick Cheney (Michael Winters); an impatiently arrogant Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Frank Corrado); and Secretary of State Colin Powell (Charles Dumas), the sole initial dissenter in a choir of voices urging Bush to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

"Stuff Happens" unspools the intricate chain of world events, reactions and counterreactions, ideological disputes, diplomatic debates and shoddy evidence that led to the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The actual threat Hussein posed, with an alleged cache of biological and nuclear weapons at his disposal, is the quasi-mystery in "Stuff Happens."

Hare's prodigious ability to construct a clear chronology of events through media sound-bites, imagined conversations and miniportraits of major politicos — also including such smooth Europeans as David Pichette's smug, wily French politician Dominique de Villepin and Mark Chamberlin's suave, canny-but-gullible British Prime Minister Tony Blair — is a feat of narrative compression.

It doesn't stream along with the inevitability of a high-speed train wreck here — which would make these old headlines urgent and meaningful.

Pappas expands the small, circular stage in ACT's Allen Theatre by having members of his large cast voice bits of narration from upper aisles and using Mary Louise Geiger's lighting wisely. But late last week some actors were still struggling to dispatch their lines with the whiplash snap that gave the 2006 Off Broadway version of "Stuff Happens" the pulse-racing momentum of a good political thriller.

Hare's imagined, semi-rhetorical scenes of realpolitik are what make this a play and not just a (largely damning) news clip file. That's where Wright's well-nuanced Bush matters. He defies caricature, to become a man whose religious faith bolsters his sense of authority and destiny, and who concedes to Powell's and Blair's pleas for further U.N. oversight — until he has no use for it any more.

"Stuff Happens" lays responsibility for the war directly on Bush's squared shoulders.

Less sharply delineated are the tensions, spoken and silent, between Powell and his colleagues, especially Bush's other high-ranking African-American insider, the enigmatic loyal national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (a tartly confident Tracy Michelle Hughes).

Hare has Cheney call Powell out for trying to work both sides of the street as a member of the power elite — and as a "good guy" military hero above the political fray, who decries hawkish "armchair generals." Dumas has the gravitas, carriage and no-guff attitude of an old general as he makes the case for and against war. But we don't see enough of the human, Shakespearean toll taken by Powell's internal conflict and capitulation to power.

It would be good if ACT's "Stuff Happens" gets tighter and more crackling as the run continues. In any case, it is one heck of a civics lesson.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com

CORRECTION: The David Hare play "Stuff Happens" is playing at ACT Theatre, 700 Union St., Seattle, Tuesdays-Sundays through July 22. An incorrect address appeared in Tuesday's theater review.