Set in 1971, current as latest news from Iraq

Some historical plays are all about the past, but really good ones are just as much about now. Watching

Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers

, the lively L.A. Theatre Works production running this weekend at Annenberg Center's Harold Prince Theatre, I was processing Vietnam - and thinking Iraq.

Top Secret

vigorously maintains that the American press is not just a prodder and inciter; it has a rigorous job to do in order for democracy to work. The play is about the Washington Post's bold 1971 decision to print details from the purloined Pentagon Papers, but it resonates directly into this decade.

Listen closely, and you hear Iraq's weapons of mass destruction rearing their unfound warheads. Except for the now-dissolved Knight Ridder Washington bureau, widely acknowledged as the sole outfit skeptical about the Bush administration's prewar WMD line, where was media rigor?

The Pentagon Papers, a government-researched history of the United States' involvement in Vietnam, were stamped top secret. The New York Times' purloined copy yielded details on Page One for three days, until President Richard M. Nixon's administration got a court injunction, claiming the document's release could put American lives at risk.

So the Washington Post, led by cold-sweating yet principled publisher Katharine Graham and aggressive editor Benjamin Bradlee, got its own copy. The Pentagon Papers, the Post staff quickly understood, were full of tales about questionable decision-making and U.S. hubris in high places. But a fatal risk? Only if two decades of American policymakers were to die of humiliation.

Top Secret

, by versatile author Geoff Cowan and the late, talented Post reporter Leroy Aarons, is no First Amendment lecture; it's all the sharper for its dramatic nuance, for plumbing the jittery politics of the '70s and the internal machinations of the Post. The newspaper was not wholly high-minded about running its Pentagon Papers material. For Bradlee and his staff, federal news was always both a national and a local story; the Post had been burned by the Times' scoop and could now recoup.

But the decision to publish wasn't simple: The Washington Post Co. had just gone public and had plenty to lose if its execs went to jail under expensive legal challenges; Bradlee and the staff had as much to lose if they sat on the material once they obtained it.

So great arguments played out, first among Post officials who had to decide whether to print the story (that's

Top Secret

's Act 1) and then with the feds, who clamped down on the Post once it was printing the material (that's Act 2).

The outstanding L.A. Theatre Works is devoted to radio theater, and

Top Secret

plays out, at six microphones, with a sterling 11-member cast that includes Broadway and film actors Susan Sullivan, John Heard, Gregory Harrison and John Vickery. A sound-effects artist works on stage, and the actors, radio-style, hold scripts they almost never refer to. They react to each other as if the play were fully staged.

L.A. Theatre Works is a national theatrical treasure, on the air weekly on public radio and often with major performers, but not on any of Philadelphia's three NPR affiliates.

Presented by L.A. Theatre Works as part of Penn Presents, at the Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St., 8 tonight and 2 p.m. tomorrow. Tickets: $45. 215-898-3900 or

» READ MORE: www.pennpresents.org

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