Acclaimed playwright David Hare’s 2004 work, Stuff Happens, is often seen in tandem with efforts by contemporary Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, and The Queen screenplay) to make relatively fresh political events into instant, stirring and concertedly literary history. Apropos of Stuff Happens — a behind-closed-doors look at how the Bush administration went from 9-11 to the Iraq War, featuring all the key players — Hare has made such knotty comments as “it’s a history play that just happens to centre on recent history,” and “what happened happened; nothing in the play is knowingly untrue.”

Nigel Shawn Williams, who plays Colin Powell in Studio 180’s Canadian premiere of the play, speaks of the challenges of straddling this delicate line between fiction and fact, character and living, breathing person. “Hare has given me someone with ideals and morals, and intellectual status,” says Williams. “So I’m trying to approach him as I would, say, Odysseus, or any other character that, in some way, is in the process of becoming mythical.

“Who these people are, personally — we don’t, we can’t know that. And yet I can’t necessarily take responsibility for other people’s ideas and ideals of who Powell is. At the same time, I have to throw out what I thought, or think, he is. I liken it to trying to portray Martin Luther King, Jr. You just can’t deal with that — bear that history, that responsibility of other people’s visions of him on stage. You have to try to find a very honest human being and then move him forward from there, with his morality and intelligence and drives.”

In a sense Williams is fortunate, for Powell is — unlike Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and, perhaps most so, the troublingly opaque Rice — the conscience of Stuff Happens. (The New York Times gave the Public Theater’s mounting the alternate title, “The Tragedy of Colin Powell.”) “He’s got a good fight, and a good point, but nobody wanted, or indeed intended, to listen to him,” says Williams. “He was the Bush administration’s white dove for the international community. And he’s the moral centre of this play.”

The fact that Powell was not heeded, and the ongoing, depressing ramifications of that fact, is paramount to Hare’s tragic construct. His title comes from Rumsfeld’s glib, ironic words in the face of violence in Baghdad after the American invasion: “Stuff happens... and it’s untidy, and freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” It’s a statement that, with its capitulatory inevitability, has an almost Shakespearean, or Shavian, ring to it.
“We all know how it ends,” says Williams. “Like, the butler did it. The great drama here is how these people led us there. Hare has written some scenes that are so fantastic and so appalling that nobody can actually say these things might not have been said, or might not, at least, have been considered: they’re the only way for us to be where we are now. By knowing how it happened — something so ludicrous, so ridiculous, so insulting, so damaging and so murderous — perhaps we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.”