Word: stuffs
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...theory was born out of the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Though he wasn't a grape grower or even a gardener, Steiner set forth guidelines for farming timed to the season as well as the zodiac. Close to homeopathy, biodynamics is hyper-organic stuff. The technique includes eight different steps, using materials from cow dung to chamomile flowers, and is difficult to learn without someone like Armenier coaching. The vineyard worker must watch the calendar and the sun and moonrise for the precise times to add various supplements to the soil...
...wants to traverse the road to the invasion of Iraq in rational steps--lots of jaw-jaw at the United Nations before war-war begins. President George W. Bush, played with implacable self-righteousness by Keith Carradine, is of a different mind. As imagined by David Hare in Stuff Happens, the only voice Bush hears or heeds belongs to God, who is in a bellicose mood. Both recent history and the laws of dramaturgy tell us, even before the beginning of the play--in its U.S. premiere at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum--how this debate between unequals will come...
Director Gordon Davidson gives the play a bristling, relentless staging, with full awareness of the comic possibilities in Dick Cheney's glum realism and Donald Rumsfeld's chipper heedlessness--and of the shadowy hints of tragedy in Colin Powell's ambiguous role. Stuff Happens may be overlong, but it is often very good theater--especially when it is, as it were, on the record, re-creating the known absurdities (and apparent lies) of Establishment figures enabling a mysteriously driven leader. Power, in this play, does not exactly corrupt, but it does render people giddy with their essentially unchallenged ability...
Still, there is something discomfiting about Stuff Happens. In a docudrama, it is always the second half of the neologism that makes us queasy. Hare is a supremely self-confident playwright. His dramatic inventions--of private conversations, of motivational hints--are always plausible. And applaudable, if you are, like this reviewer, skeptical of the Iraq war effort. But they are, of course, historically unreliable. For Hare is a British twit of the tiresomely superior leftist kind. We have no doubt that if he, instead of Blair, had been Prime Minister, he would have stood up more manfully to the Bushies...
...corner is a secret alliance of powerful mystics (called Travelers) and badass sword-wielding ninjas (known as Harlequins) who protect the Travelers; in the other is that shadowy organization the Tabula. At stake? The fate of civilization. Of course, this is all completely nuts--but it's also the stuff that first-rate high-tech paranoid-schizophrenic thrillers are made...