Playreaders: “Top Secret”

  • top-secret

Event Category: Theatrical Events

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  • In Top Secret, a play by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons, a character speaks of a President who considers the news media “the enemy,” and “would like nothing better than to destroy us.”

    That character is Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, and the President is Richard Nixon. The year is 1971. The Nixon Administration has targeted the Post over the newspaper’s risky decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of U.S. government decision-making in the war in Vietnam, released by a radicalized former military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg. When the New York Times, the first recipient of the Papers, is barred by a federal court from publishing any more excerpts, Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Post, seizes the opportunity to pick up where there Times has left off, and thereby make the Post a newspaper of national significance. But the risks are tremendous. The government may be empowered to charge the newspaper under the Espionage Act, and send the editors to prison.

    The tense war of nerves between the Post and the Nixon Administration, and the ensuing courtroom battle, is dramatized in Cowan and Aarons’ play, being presented by Playreaders on Wednesday and Thursday, July 25 and 26, at 7:30pm, at St. Paul’s Church, Cardo #6. Tickets are 30 pesos, and go on sale starting 45 minutes before showtime.

    Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers covers essentially the same story as Steven Spielberg’s docudrama The Post, released last year, but the play is far more faithful to actual events, and considerably more exciting. Drawing on court records, interviews, memoirs, and other primary source material, Cowan and Aarons depict what occurred from the day the Pentagon Papers were placed in the hands of Post reporters to the raucous fight in federal court – a fight that turned on a crucial question: Who could better be trusted to relate the truth to the American public, the
    government or a responsible news organization?

    Ten actors portray 17 roles in Top Secret, in a cast headed by Victoria Roberts as Katharine Graham and Chuck Rubin as Ben Bradlee. The other members of the cast, in order of appearance, are Lee Harris, Jim Newell, Howard Bach, Fil Formicola, Neil Sklar, Fredric Dannen, Clara Dunham, and David Johanssen. Fredric Dannen directs.

    Tickets will be sold at the door at 6:45 each evening on a first come, first serve basis. All ticket holders must be present when the doors open at 7:00 or their seat may be resold. The play will begin at 7:30 or when the house is filled.

    Please remember to bring your clean plastic bags and put them in the basket to the right of the Parish Hall Door for the St. Paul’s Mattress Project.

    Orin

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