Did NYC Critics Vote for David Hare's Politically Charged Stuff Happens?

David Hare's provocative political play Stuff Happens, which opened off-Broadway at the Public Theater on April 13, brings together the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney as its characters. Inspired by actual events, the show has a very "ripped-from-the-headlines" feel to it. How did the critics vote?

Here's a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com Review: "Like the Iraq war itself, David Hare's play Stuff Happens, now in its New York premiere at the Public Theater, starts with a decisive show of force, then bogs down. Its canvas first seems as large as the world, as the playwright deftly lays out the players in the momentous drama that led the U.S. and Britain into preemptive military action more than three years ago. But after a fleet-footed first act, the play's focus narrows to a timeline of tedious diplomatic push-me-pull-you, and finally shifts from 'Living Newspaper' reportage to an op-ed slam dunk as striking for what it leaves out as what it includes."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "The Public Theater's invigorating new production of Mr. Hare's journalistic drama about the road to war in Iraq, first mounted with epic proportions at the National Theater in London in 2004, is here conducted on the modest scale of a town-hall meeting. It is as if a telescope, first set up to be looked through at the wrong end, were now righted, changing not composition but perspective…. The play now seems less an arrogant, animated history book with a fixed agenda than a fluid public speculation—collective work of imagination that attempts to grasp how and why an unnecessary and unwinnable war was allowed to happen…. There's a new Brechtian distance between player and part, though in the cases of Mr. James and Ms. Reuben, the performances are also steeped in warmly insightful empathy that lends the production a concrete as opposed to abstract humanity."

Frank Scheck of The New York Post: "Stuff Happens is a riveting piece of theater that well justifies the playwright's description of it as a 'history play.' Indeed, there are times when the situations and characters depicted seem nothing less than Shakespearean, with Powell as the tragically conflicted, Hamlet-like figure at its center…. What makes it work as drama rather than mere agitprop is the playwright's ability to render these events with clarity and dramatic force."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "Since the playwright is British, much time is devoted to Tony Blair, the only character who undergoes any real crisis. With the exception of Colin Powell, the Yanks are all arrogant and cocksure. Stuff Happens is more an indictment than a play. Plays used to have something called "conflict," in which the audience was exposed to two points of view. The reason Shaw's Saint Joan is great is because, instead of merely indicting Joan's adversaries, Shaw makes them compelling."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "It's a skillful, cogent examination of power, how it is used and misused, celebrated and accommodated. That its large cast of characters is still very much in the news—and in control—makes Stuff Happens all the more unnerving…. Hare, author of such fine dramas as Plenty and Racing Demon as well as the screenplay for The Hours, doesn't pretend to have written a documentary, although the evening is awash in facts. His interpretation of history is naturally selective, and theatergoers of a left-leaning sensibility will not be disappointed in his presentation."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "Hare, one of England's major playwrights of conscience, deftly weaves his current-events drama from verbatim documents, copious interviews and presumptive bursts of eerily prescient imagination. Some facts have been updated for our belated appreciation and horror…. Iconic American politicians are nailed more precisely here than in Nicholas Hytner's expert British production. Byron Jennings as Tony Blair comes off as less of a weasel, but all our president's men and Condoleezza Rice are impersonated with more acute familiarity—that is to say, just short of contempt."