Rebecca Droke, Post-Gazette British Prime Minister Tony Blair, played by Doug Mertz, left, and President Bush, played by David Whalen, hold a private conversation about Iraq at Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch. Click photo for larger image. 'Stuff Happens' Where: Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre at Heymann Theatre, Stephen Foster Memorial, Oakland. When: Today through June 2. Tues. 7 p.m.; Wed.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sun. 2 p.m.; also, May 13, 7 p.m.; June 2, 2 and 8 p.m. Tickets: $29-$45; 412-394-3353.

Playwright David Hare knows why people tell him they don't want to see his plays -- it's the subject matter, which could indeed be a barrier for one who writes about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, crisis of faith in the Church of England, failures of journalism and other shortcomings of society, regarded from a left-wing perspective.

"I'm absolutely used to hearing, 'I really didn't want to see this,' " he says. They probably fear they're going to be lectured. And yet when they tell him, it's to admit that they're glad they went after all. "They think they know it all, or imagine they do, and are then surprised that they don't."

That's certainly been a dominant reaction to his most recent and controversial play, "Stuff Happens," an epic journey through the inner sanctum of the Bush presidency to dramatize its decision to go to war with Iraq. In spite of its flippant title, borrowed from one of its characters, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, it's a play with humor but also Shakespearean size and seriousness, putting on stage all the major players, from President Bush and Vice President Cheney to Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Laura Bush, etc., etc., and including Tony Blair and his British team and the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin.

A hit with audiences in London (2004), Los Angeles (2005) and, somewhat rewritten in the light of new revelations, New York (2005), it now comes to Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, on the same weekend President Bush will be giving the commencement address at St. Vincent College in Latrobe.

It took long enough for theaters to take it on that Hare promised he would help promote it whenever he could, which is why he agreed to talk to the Post-Gazette from his home in London. Now, however, it is starting to spread, with productions in such other American cities as Boston, Chicago and Seattle.

"Somehow it's all right now," he says. "I think we've passed the stage where you congratulate the artistic director for his bravery in doing it."

Tell that to PICT artistic director Andrew Paul, who well before its opening received angry mail and has had one board member resign in protest.

Playwright David Hare, author of "Stuff Happens."

Hare recognizes those reactions. But with "Stuff Happens," he says, "the covert way of dismissing it has been to say, 'Oh, we know all that,' which is surprising for two reasons." One is Hare's British perspective, which gives the play a taste of something Americans generally do not know. And the other is the surprising fact that the play is "three-fourths fiction," the product of Hare's imagination, "so how can they think they know that?"

The play certainly feels like a documentary, so audiences are often surprised to hear that so much of it is invented. Hare says that passages of direct address, when a character talks right to the audience, do come from the public record. "But the principal events happen behind closed doors," and he supplied these himself, based on research, conjecture and a playwright's insight into human nature.

He says the key meeting was in April 2002, in Crawford, Texas, when Blair met Bush and "to the horror of their staffs, they walked out alone for several hours. ... Staffs are always alarmed when leaders walk alone." He tells a tale of Blair's staff being so alarmed at being closed out that on another occasion, "they bugged the flowers on the table."

What was so controversial and denied by many when Hare started to write in early 2004 may not be so controversial now. "I say Blair knew from April 2002 the likely drift" of American actions. "Now, the only question is whether I put the date too late. ... I say this not in the slightest spirit of self-congratulation, but [his own view that the war] was cooked up by neo-cons for an agenda of their own ... is almost orthodoxy."

Now there are more inside accounts, such as the most recent from George Tenet (a character in the play), endorsing the outlines of what was just good playwriting. The fullest recent account in England has been from a former minister of defense who has said, in effect, "I'd talk with Rumsfeld, Tony with Bush and [foreign minister] Jack Straw with Rice. ... All would be well, and then it would all change. Face it, we all underestimated Dick Cheney."

When the play was to be staged at the New York Public Theater, the director, Dan Sullivan, thought it would be better if it stuck more with Powell and Rice, "through whom the audience sees the whole play." He also thought the argument between the French and the British was arcane for Americans.

So in his rewriting, Hare downplayed the latter and expanded the former, which allowed him to correct the portrait of Powell. Thanks to insider sources, "I now believe Powell went to the U.N. knowing how dodgy that evidence [of WMDs] was." Hare is willing to see this as "a serving soldier [obeying his] sense of honorable service," but it is still true that he "failed to exercise his influence" to stop the rush to war.

As a result of the rewriting, Hare says his Powell is now "less of a liberal hero, but more a tragic one."

	20070510rd_stuff03, Post-Gazette David Whalen, left, portrays President Bush, Pascale Armand is Condoleezza Rice and Richard McMillan is Donald Rumsfeld in Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre's production of David Hare's "Stuff Happens," with previews tonight and Friday and opening night Saturday. The play runs through June 2. Click photo for larger image.

His sources are private. "People love talking to playwrights," he says, because they know it's just for background and they won't be quoted. "Their fingerprints are not on it." That's too bad, because if Hare was able to write a good memoir about the writing and controversy over "Via Dolorosa" and its take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there would be a great book about "Stuff Happens," but that's "unfortunately impossible."

PICT is doing "Stuff Happens" with the same lead actors who just finished "Julius Caesar," which sets up such intriguing character parallels as Caesar-Cheney, Antony-Bush, Cassius-Rumsfeld and, of course, Brutus-Powell. Hare calls this pairing "fantastic! -- an absolutely fair analogy."

Although "Stuff Happens" was done off-Broadway, Hare is a more familiar presence on Broadway. He thanks the success of his early play, "Plenty." In fact, Broadway has often been more hospitable to "my generation of British playwrights" -- Pinter, Stoppard and Hare -- than to Americans.

He admires the "fantastic standard" of Broadway production, but he especially loves the audiences: "The city is filled with the most intelligent audiences in the world." He was on Broadway this year with two plays, his own "The Vertical Hour," starring Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, and as the director and informal dramaturg for Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," a solo turn for Vanessa Redgrave.

"You could say," he observes, "at the greatest reactionary times in society, Broadway has been the place to go for a good dose of left-wing drama." He was thinking of such plays as "The Elephant Man," "Angels in America" and the works of Caryl Churchill. He supposes that's "a reaction to a lot of froth," for which Broadway is better known.

Many of those plays have been by Hare, who had seven on Broadway from 1995-99, including "Amy's View" with Judi Dench, "Skylight" with Michael Gambon, "Judas Kiss" with Liam Neeson, "Blue Room" with Nicole Kidman and "Via Dolorosa," a solo play he did himself.

	Rebecca Droke, Post-Gazette Allen Gilmore portrays Secretary of State Colin Powell, who, playwright Hare says, became "less of a liberal hero, but more a tragic one," in a rewrite. Click photo for larger image.

Redgrave, Dench, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg -- he's very aware that he has benefited from working with "an extraordinary generation of actresses [who are] the greatest resource of the British theater."

Reminded that "Via Dolorosa" just had a four-performance run with Martin Giles at PICT, he alluded again to what we might call the Hare Effect, this reluctance to see serious plays that then turn out to be theatrically engaging after all.

Things aren't always what they seem. For example, there's Hare's knighthood -- yes, it's Sir David -- the acceptance of which, given his long opposition to the British establishment, might seem to have compromised his principles.

"It didn't feel so," he says, "but I know it did to others." It was offered to him by the new Labour government in 1998, when Blair had been in power just a few months, and he knew it came from them, not the Palace. "But, yes, I did have to go to the Palace and bow the knee."

Since he had accepted an honor from the French state the previous year, he says he wondered, "What sort of situation would it be" if he couldn't accept one from his own? In addition, he knew it was partly an act of restitution from Labour, which had "set their attack dogs on 'Absence of War,' " his 1993 attack on the party's failings.

Ultimately, "Why would I say no?"

And how will Pittsburghers react, offered a chance to see his grand reconstruction of the Bush administration at work?