Stuff Happens, then it doesn't

That's the life of this theater. Plays generally only last 6 to 8 weeks. Just when you're having a good time, time for another.

Stuff Happens has been especially fun for me. This is a great cast that's very politically aware, especially of the importance of the material they're working with. I've had some great hallway discussions with Keith Carradine, John Michael Higgins, John Vickery, Stephen Spinella, Brian George, Jay Harrik, Alan Oppenheimer, Julian Sands and my friend from Lion King, the original Scar on Broadway, John Vickery. We've all been talking about the Valerie Plame case with great interest and hope that this is the case they'll all get caught on.

I encourage everyone I know to go see this when it goes to New York. The cast may change a little when it heads to Broadway, but one thing's for sure. This play will make you think. And laugh. And worry.

I'd like to thank everyone here at the Taper on this run. As a very political stagehand, I must say this has been my favorite play of all the ones I've worked on, and you all made it that way.

Backstage Conversations about a Character Not in the Play

This past Sunday, I broke the breaking news about Rove being the leak in the Valerie Plame crime to the actors backstage at the Mark Taper Forum, where the play Stuff Happens is in its last two weeks. It was weird. I was telling George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney that Karl Rove probably broke the law by leaking Valerie Plame's cover to the press.

Well, I was telling the actors who play those parts. It's a shame there's no Karl Rove in the play. It would have been positively surreal to tell that actor that his character was, hopefully, only weeks away from the Frog March.

Backstage at the Taper being a decidedly Blue State, there was a sense of eagerness, which has now, a few days later, settled into a kind of cynical hope. We've all realized that these sleaze bags are going to get the best lawyers in the world to try to weazel them out of this.

It's a complicated deal, indeed. Democrats have such simple scandals. Republicans know how to keep the public interested in kidnapped children or 'Lil Kim. They make their scandals excrutiatingly complicated.