By Harry Haun
01 Dec 2006

Stuff Happens, said another way by David Hare, comes out The Vertical Hour, which tipped the scales at two and a half hours in its premiere rant-through Nov. 30 at the Music Box Theatre. The words were passionate, frequently funny, intelligent, sexy, political, plentiful — for wont of a single word, Hare-brainy. This could only be a David Hare play.

"Stuff Happens told the public story of how the British and Americans went to war," Hare said. "This is more the private story. This is how people's lives have been changed since the Iraq invasion and since 9/11. They are companion pieces. They belong together."

Which was what The Public's Oskar Eustis was telling him last year. According to Eustis: "He had written this when we had done Stuff Happens, and I was trying to convince him to let us do this at the same time so that we could have both shows running at The Public simultaneously. But then Broadway beckoned and so forth, and he did what he had to do, but I think the plays would have been a really interesting dialogue. We could have done this in the Anspacher, while Stuff Happens is being done in the Newman."

Instead, The Vertical Hour has gone even more public than The Public with a big Broadway production of words and ideas. Imported from the movies, Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy head a cast of five, all of whom are making their Broadway debuts.

It is also the first time that Hare has sprung a new play on Broadway. Previously, he has stuck to his own British backyard, perfecting his works there before peddling them across the pond. So how did this happen, one has to ask. "Because," said Hare, "Sam Mendes, basically, stole the script from Robert Fox's office. He wanted to direct it, and he lives here — and the actress best qualified to play the part, Julianne Moore, also lived here. And so, because they lived here, that seemed the best place to put it on. There are also three central characters in the play who are Americans so it just seemed the right thing to do.

"It's a play about America," he added — yet, strangely, its heart and mind are elsewhere, save for two small scenes bookending the opus. They take place in an office on the Yale campus where Moore, a war correspondent back from the frontlines hides behind a professorship, helping two colorfully disparate students (Dan Bittner and Rutina Wesley). The rest of the play occurs under a majestic tree on a serene hilltop in Shropshire in rural England near the Welsh border. Her physiotherapist fiancι (Andrew Scott) brings her here to meet his estranged, roue dad (Nighy), and the plot triangulates.

There is also a third country — invisible, insistent and never arrived at — pulling at her.

Scott, who plays the son in danger of being cuckolded by his father, realizes he hasn't really earned any audience sympathy. "Yeah, it's that sort of role. People's natural stance is to go with certain opinions at certain times when people don't have fervent ideas about things that are not black and white The character of the father is black, and the character of the woman is white. So I suppose people relate to the other character, who's a bit gray.

"I suppose the challenge of it was to make somebody who's a listener an active thing."

He has had good luck in England, role-wise. He just finished a run of Dying City by the American playwright Christopher Shinn. A separate production opens Feb. 26, 2007, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, starring Pablo Schreiber in a dual role. Scott also plucked off an Olivier Award for a play at the Royal Court called A Girl in the Car With a Man. "I played this guy who's sorta self-loving — narcissist guy — and the whole thing we had to do, we had to film it. We filmed the whole thing. We had a camera. We filmed it as part of the experience for the audience. I filmed myself, and it was projected simultaneously so the audience had the choice of either watching me on screen or real. It was an absolute nightmare. I was really against the idea of filming myself, but I did it, and it worked well."

Scott Pask, a co-designer of The Coast of Utopia, to give you an idea how big he thinks, gives great tree, and he's very proud of what he hath wrought here: "It's sculpted. I drew it. I oversaw it. I leafed it. I have individually wired leafs. It became a major endeavor."

There was a starry group of first-nighters who turned out to see what Hare had to say.

Gerald Schoenfeld, on his way into the Shubert house he co-owns with the Irving Berlin estate to see a play co-produced by his Shubert Organization, stumbled over a barricade at the door and almost fell. "I'm suing, I'm suing," he jested to any journalist within earshot.

A tanned and terrifically turned-out Ellen Barkin has entered her austerity period looking like a knockout in an elegant black cocktail dress. This was her No Jewels Look, but the dress was cut so low nobody noticed. Interested in some stage work? "If they'll have me."

The Best Actor and Best Actress winners of the 2006 Evening Standard Awards, passed out Nov. 27 in London, were both in attendance. Kathleen Turner, cited for her blowzy, boozy Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, confessed "surprise and delight" at the selection. "It really caught me off-guard," she admitted. But the prize will balance nicely against Bill Irwin's Tony when the two kick off their national tour Jan. 3 at the Kennedy Center. Irwin's performance — along with two others due over here after the first of the year (Kevin Spacey's in A Moon for the Misbegotten and Michael Sheen's in Frost/Nixon) — lost to Rufus Sewell's portrayal of a music-loving Czech in Rock 'n' Roll.

Sewell said to expect him — and the play, another political cavalcade by Tom Stoppard (set in Czechoslovakia, 1968-1989) and the Evening Standard's pick for 2006's Best Play — in New York "hopefully, next year." There is, he allowed "a bit of Stoppard to do here, stuff already going on" — an allusion to The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, part one in the trilogy that just cranked up at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont. "We're going to try and see it. I'm only here a couple of days. I've just finished a play. I'm just resting and seeing things." Continued...

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