War secrets make radio drama's revival relevant

War and secrecy are longtime companions, for reasons that can include protecting the lives of soldiers and protecting the reputation of a government that has lied about why and how a war is being conducted. When the news media chooses to break that secrecy in the public interest, a battle is often joined over the 1st Amendment, as was the case with the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, a historic event that writers Geoffrey Cowan and the late Leroy Aarons turned into a radio play.

L.A. Theatre Works is reviving "Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers," with performances at the Skirball Cultural Center today through Sunday.

The putative secrecy of the Bush administration during the Iraq war has reminded some, including L.A. Theatre Works producer Susan Loewenberg, of the continuing relevance of the Pentagon Papers case and "Top Secret." Last year, she and Cowan and actor-director John Rubenstein decided to revise the play for a new production that has been performed at 23 universities and cultural centers across the country before its last stop back home in Los Angeles.

"We've had time to work on it and think about it," Loewenberg says. "As a piece of theater it's better and more elaborate" than the original, produced during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

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In the new version, John Heard plays Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee and Susan Sullivan plays Post Publisher Katharine Graham, who ultimately had to decide whether to publish the classified documents. In the original, Ed Asner played Bradlee and Marsha Mason played Graham.

In the current production, which also features Gregory Harrison, James Gleason and Bo Foxworth, the Graham role has been enlarged, at the suggestion of Rubenstein. Graham, who died in 2001, has become the narrator of the events.

"She's the right voice to be framing the story," Rubenstein says. "The play is substantially the same, but I felt we needed to know a little more about what was going on with Nixon and Vietnam because so many people in the audience now might not know the background."

The so-called Pentagon Papers were a secret 47-volume history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam commissioned by former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and made public by one of the project's authors, Daniel Ellsberg, who released them to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Ellsberg did so in an effort to expose the official lies he believed had allowed the nation to pursue a tragically misguided foreign policy.