Next Season, NYTW Will Spread the News

Dramas centered on real-world events will figure prominently in New York Theatre Workshop's 2009-10 season.

Aftermath, by Exonerated creators Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, details the Iraq war from the civilians' perspective. Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers dramatizes The Washington Post's struggle to print its reports on classified government documents about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. (Above: Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee outside U.S. District Court in 1971.)

Also in the season, director Doug Hughes (Doubt) will helm an adaptation of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCuller's classic American novel. Rebecca Gilman (Spinning Into Butter) will adapt.

Though the New York Times first broke the news about the Pentagon Papers, The Washington Post's story might lend itself to higher drama. The Times had more than six months to review some 7,000 pages of government documents, which were leaked to them by Defense Department employee Daniel Ellsberg.

The Post had five days.

Also, the Post's staredown with the Nixon administration was the first major test of publisher Katharine Graham, who took over the paper after her husband's suicide eight years earler. It also prefigured Bradlee's battles with the administration over Watergate.

(Notes for Non-History Buffs: The Pentagon Papers were a Defense Department study about U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, and they revealed potentially embarrassing details, including secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia. The first report about the documents was printed in The New York Times on June 13, 1971. The Nixon administration then obtained a federal court injunction preventing the rest of the series from running, even though the documents detailed events that occurred before Nixon took office. Five days later, the Post, which had been given some of the Pentagon Papers in the interim, began publishing a series of its own. Though the paper's lawyers successfully prevented the government from obtaining an injunction, publication ceased for about 10 days until the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the Times' and Post's favor.)

As a newspaper-drama junkie, we cannot wait to see this play.

In case you hadn't noticed.