In one of the very few dry patches in “Stuff Happens,” David Hare’s crisp docudrama, a Christopher Hitchens-esque journalist fulminates about Western debate over the propriety of invading Iraq: “How spoiled, how indulged we are to discuss the manner.”

Seeing as Mr. Hare has devoted an entire play to doing just that, he presumably doesn’t agree. And provided they’ve bought tickets to hear a discussion of the assumptions and decisions that led the West into its three-years-and-counting involvement in Iraq, audiences of “Stuff Happens” are likely to find the discussion just as stimulating as he does.

These fictionalized scenarios are surprisingly free of “I told you so” self-righteousness, although Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld’s sunny predictions do come in for some ribbing. (The play’s title stems from Mr. Rumsfeld’s dismissal of the post-invasion looting of Baghdad.) They are terse, well-reasoned suppositions of what might have happened – and since the London premiere of “Stuff Happens” in the fall of 2004,” what might have happened” has in several cases proved to be “what in fact happened.”

Aided by the staging of Daniel Sullivan, who works wonders with nothing but his suit-wearing actors and a dozen or so wheeled desk chairs, Mr. Hare – an unapologetically partisan playwright whose more naturalistic plays can sound like canned position papers – has created the theatrical equivalent of Bob Woodward’s fly-on-the-wall Beltway procedurals. The main difference is that Mr. Hare freely admits to making much of it up. Knowing what we know about the players, and the final results, and the way said players reacted to said results, Mr. Hare has worked backward and assembled a fictitious series of behind-closed-doors meetings.

Mr. Hare has alluded to the Shakespearean practice of fictionalizing recent history, and his gloss on George W. Bush frequently brings to mind Henry V, another fun-loving fellow who mended his ways before succeeding his father and going to war. Henry V also saved his linguistic flights for the crowds; behind closed doors, he was fairly content to let the likes of Exeter and Canterbury suss out strategy, occasionally nudging them on track.

Mr. Hare’s Bush, played with wily charm by a somewhat beefy Jay O. Sanders, is hardly the stock liberal caricature of an obtuse, oil-mad buffoon. He listens a lot more than he talks, drawing out others’ opinions with lines like “Raise your issue,” “Say more,” and “I’m going to take some persuading,” but he doesn’t necessarily need for everyone to agree with him. He’s the president, not them. And after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, his and the nation’s path becomes clear: “I want you all to understand that we are at war, and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters.”

(Henry V’s subordinates extol not only his political maturity but also his piety, a shared enthusiasm that clearly concerns Mr. Hare.You can practically feel him wince every time Bush uses the word “evil” – something he had done in 319 different speeches through June 2003, Mr. Hare takes pains to report.)

Bush is into his Henry V mode and well out of his Hal stage by the time “Stuff Happens” begins, although a surprisingly earthy Rumsfeld sort of fills in as Falstaff, as when he kicks off a lunch by announcing, “I could eat a baby through the bars of a crib.” Anyone searching for that line in the public record will find their efforts in vain: By Mr. Hare’s count, less than a quarter of “Stuff Happens” has been cribbed from actual transcripts. This achieves several goals, among them the room for rewrites (one press performance included a Bush quote from just 10 days earlier) and ensuring that he, unlike Mr. Woodward, is not beholden to any one source. He can call it how he sees it.

And how does he see it? Mr. Hare has focused much of his sympathies on Colin Powell and Prime Minister Blair. “Stuff Happens” posits that both of these men lobbied hard from within to rein in the hawks and employ diplomacy. This urge, first seen as a viable alternative to war, finally morphs into a means for boosting global legitimacy by broadening the “coalition” of countries participating in military efforts.

American audiences will undoubtedly be more familiar with the efforts of Mr. Powell, who is hailed at one point (albeit by Dominique de Villepin) as “virtually the only uncontested hero in America.” His wartime experience, an anomaly among the upper-level decision makers, gives him both the practical and moral higher ground: “Politicians start wars; soldiers fight and die in them.”

As depicted by Peter Francis James, Mr. Powell is an even-tempered but prideful man whose efforts to sway various administration officials invariably fall flat. The majority of these overtures are directed toward Condoleezza Rice (an uncanny Gloria Reuben): Messrs. Hare and Sullivan have added a bizarre and mildly insulting wash of flirtation to this relationship, reducing more than one substantive policy argument into a coy stab at intimacy.

The other tragic hero is Blair, and Byron Jennings’s take on the prime minister, almost as intimidating physically as he is intellectually, will come as more of a surprise on this side of the Atlantic. In a pivotal Texas meeting, Blair begs Bush to provide him with sufficient political cover by assuring him that the case for invading Iraq is iron-clad. “We can’t go to war because of what we fear,” he insists. “Only because of what we know.”

Mr. Sullivan’s cast proves itself more than capable of conveying the resonances of the buildup to the war as well as the daily scrum of hunches and scramblings that add up to a formulated policy. It’s hard to pick favorites among the leading sextet, but Ms. Reuben’s cryptic Rice and Mr. Jennings’s increasingly desperate Blair stand out, with only Zach Grenier’s sullen, saturnine Cheney (a surprisingly minor character) falling short. Among the supporting cast, David Pittu is extraordinary as both Wolfowitz and a compromised MI6 operative, and Robert Sella offers an appropriately unctuous de Villepin.

The only real missteps in “Stuff Happens,” besides the weird splash of Colin-Condi sexual tension, spring from a small handful of momentum-killing tangents. The occasional op-ed articles posing as monologues – the pro-war journalist’s harangue comes from one such sequence – add little beyond 10 or 15 extra minutes. (Mr. Sullivan turns up the house lights during these, perhaps to make sure nobody sneaks off for a cigarette.)

The most transparent of these comes at the very end, along with an unnecessary “Harper’s Index”-style checklist of liberal bugaboos – Mr. Cheney’s Halliburton connections, the number of Americans who still believe the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi, etc. No matter how worthy of exploration these factoids may or may not be, the tail end of a highly focused inquiry on the run-up to war (and one creeping toward three hours in length) isn’t the place to introduce them. As Mr. Hare and his gifted cast and crew make clear, exactly how and why we got into Iraq offers plenty to chew on.

Until May 28 (425 Lafayette Street at Astor Place, 212-260-2400).