Spring Break
Letter: Community encouraged to attend URI play
Issue date: 10/16/07 Section: Editorial/Opinion
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10/16/07 - To the Cigar,
The URI Theater Department is undoubtedly a class act, and its current production of David Hare's "Stuff Happens" (directed seamlessly by Christian Wittwer) offers a riveting performance of the intrigues, betrayals, ideological dog fights and also the deeply felt conflicts and convictions of those who shaped the events resulting in the Iraq war.
The cast gives less a sense of "impersonation" of the players here (the president, Ms. Rice, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Cheney, the French prime minister de Villepin, and others) and more an uncanny sense of "extension," of a simulation so perversely "real" that, well, the effect is stunningly creepy.
As such, the play as "performance" reminds us brilliantly that the games, posturings, scripted moments and movements themselves were "performances" lubricated by spin for hearts and minds, whether these are White House tête-à-têtes or high stakes melodramas at the UN, "shock and awe" or "Mission Accomplished" complete with battleship and jump suit.
What's unsettling is the deeply empty feeling that this play gives us back the truth of the political repressed, and that the "spectacle" still rules although its fig leaves are flapping. The performers are fabulous, each and every one. The gestures, their intonations and looks, and their costumes are spot on. Their interactions (those recorded, those "recreated" in the spirit of "docudrama") persuasive. The set is almost minimalist, transitions between scenes inobtrusive so that their cumulative weights and links give the effect of a noose tightening, of a doomed misadventure becoming an inexorable catastrophe. And all the while one says to oneself, "I can't believe this is happening, did happen . . . " It was like watching a political play noir.
A special kudos to Ben Gracia as Colin Powell, in whose breast all the conflicts, doubts, anger and finally the sense of just being screwed, come to roost, with moments of expressive wrath skewed by what's left of noble military loyalty to a commander in chief whose orders are from God. "Americans changed after 9/11," a commentator says. "They became dumber." Better hurry-performances are selling out.
John Leo
Director, program in film media, professor of English
The URI Theater Department is undoubtedly a class act, and its current production of David Hare's "Stuff Happens" (directed seamlessly by Christian Wittwer) offers a riveting performance of the intrigues, betrayals, ideological dog fights and also the deeply felt conflicts and convictions of those who shaped the events resulting in the Iraq war.
The cast gives less a sense of "impersonation" of the players here (the president, Ms. Rice, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Cheney, the French prime minister de Villepin, and others) and more an uncanny sense of "extension," of a simulation so perversely "real" that, well, the effect is stunningly creepy.
As such, the play as "performance" reminds us brilliantly that the games, posturings, scripted moments and movements themselves were "performances" lubricated by spin for hearts and minds, whether these are White House tête-à-têtes or high stakes melodramas at the UN, "shock and awe" or "Mission Accomplished" complete with battleship and jump suit.
What's unsettling is the deeply empty feeling that this play gives us back the truth of the political repressed, and that the "spectacle" still rules although its fig leaves are flapping. The performers are fabulous, each and every one. The gestures, their intonations and looks, and their costumes are spot on. Their interactions (those recorded, those "recreated" in the spirit of "docudrama") persuasive. The set is almost minimalist, transitions between scenes inobtrusive so that their cumulative weights and links give the effect of a noose tightening, of a doomed misadventure becoming an inexorable catastrophe. And all the while one says to oneself, "I can't believe this is happening, did happen . . . " It was like watching a political play noir.
A special kudos to Ben Gracia as Colin Powell, in whose breast all the conflicts, doubts, anger and finally the sense of just being screwed, come to roost, with moments of expressive wrath skewed by what's left of noble military loyalty to a commander in chief whose orders are from God. "Americans changed after 9/11," a commentator says. "They became dumber." Better hurry-performances are selling out.
John Leo
Director, program in film media, professor of English
