Stuff Happens

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Visit the Stuff Happens website:
http://www.MarkTaperForum.org

The historic march to a preemptive war against Iraq is told in riveting detail by playwright David Hare in the American premiere of Stuff Happens.
Gordon Davidson, CTG's founding artistic director, directs the play, which features characters such as President George W. Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and dozens more politicians and world leaders, who give voice to the ideas, policies and events that have changed the world and America's role in it.

Stuff Happens, with its fascinating combination of verbatim quotes and imagined dialogue, is an exploration into one of the most polarizing events of our time, detailing why and how Bush, his advisors and his allies came to declare war on Iraq and remove the tyrannical Saddam Hussein from power. The play traces key events from early 2001, only 10 days after Bush's inauguration, when Iraq was first mentioned as part of Bush's agenda, through Bush's "Mission Accomplished" tailhook landing onto the aircraft carrier off the coast of San Diego. Included in that sweep are the horror of 9-11 and America's retaliatory attack on al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan; the change in tactics from the hunt for al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden to Iraq's Hussein; Colin Powell's UN speech that cited "irrefutable and undeniable" CIA evidence that Iraq was concealing weapons of mass destruction; and Rumsfeld's remark that "stuff happens" when looting and rioting erupted after the fall of Baghdad.