The Origin of "Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers"

March 2, 2010 by Susan Albert Lo...

Around 1990, I called my friend Geoff Cowan seeking information about a First Amendment issue I was researching.  Geoff was teaching at UCLA at the time and was known to be an expert in the field. He answered my questions, and then told me about a docudrama he had written with his friend Leroy Aarons called TOP SECRET:  THE BATTLE FOR THE PENTAGON PAPERS.  Leroy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was The Washington Post bureau chief at the time of the “dust up” over the Papers. Though the play piqued my interest, it sat on my desk along with a pile of other scripts I liked but could not yet find a place for in our season.
When the Gulf War began in 1990, my eye happened to fall on Geoff and Roy’s manuscript.  Suddenly, a light bulb went off:  TOP SECRET resonated perfectly with the then-current debate: National Security vs. The People’s Right To Know. The play dramatically re-enacted the very issues we were experiencing at the height of the Gulf War.

We shifted into high gear, quickly contacting our local NPR station, NPR headquarters and L.A. Theatre Works’ cadre of top actors - Edward Asner, Marsha Mason, Harry Shearer, Stacy Keach, Hector Elizondo, and Ed Begley, Jr., among others, to see if they would participate. KCRW (our local station) agreed to record the show for broadcast nationwide and NPR agreed to national distribution; we were off and running. The idea was to “go live” in Los Angeles and delay the broadcast for one day so the East Coast and Midwest would hear it at a reasonable hour. Geoff, Roy, Ruth Seymour from KCRW and I put our heads together to come up with a wish list of post-performance panelists. Of course, the first on our list was Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Post at the time of the Pentagon Papers (not to mention the center of the storm a few years later, uncovering the Watergate scandal).  I called him – cold - and to my delight he answered the call.  I gave him my pitch, and his first question was, “Who’s playing me?” I replied “Ed Asner,” and he seemed pleased. After a pause he asked, “And who is playing Kay?”  When I told him Marsha Mason, he chuckled, told me he had danced with her once at the White House, and signed off with, “I’m on board.”

After that coup, the rest was easy.

Six weeks later, with the war in the Gulf still raging, we were in the ballroom of the Guest Quarters Suite Hotel (which had been transformed into a recording studio) with 500 audience members practically hanging from the rafters. Our director, Tom Moore, had worked intensely with the authors to polish the script into a radio show, and we had assembled a dream cast. We had a spectacular panel with Bradlee and Carla Robbins, the head of the reporters’ pool in the Gulf, calling in from the NPR studios in Washington; with us in Los Angeles were George Wilson, the actual reporter who figures prominently in the play, Robert Scheer one of the prominent left-wing journalists who was a major critic of the government during the Vietnam War, Bob Maynard, the editor of the Oakland Tribune, and Peter Braestrup, a former Vietnam-era journalist and Senior Editor and Director of Communications at the Library of Congress. The play wrapped up around 1 a.m. EST, so we made sure Ben Bradlee and Carla Robbins back in D.C. had plenty of hot coffee and treats to keep them going for the post-show discussion.

Both the docudrama and the panel afterwards were grand successes, and we won the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Gold and Silver Awards for the Best Radio Drama Production that year.  In retrospect, I am glad I placed the call to Geoff that day. In 2007, we decided to transform the radio production into a stage play. So Geoff Cowan, working with our director John Rubinstein, took the premise and created a new docudrama for the stage. We then toured the show to 25 university and civic performing arts centers throughout the United States.  Along with our co-producers, Affinity Company Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop, we are delighted to be bringing this ever-relevant work to New York Theatre Workshop as we continue to confront the issue of National Security vs. The People’s Right To Know.

TOP SECRET: THE BATTLE FOR THE PENTAGON PAPERS opens at New York Theatre Workshop March 9th, 78 East Fourth St, New York, NY 10003.  www.nytw.org