The L.A. Theatre Works Audio Docudrama Series

Pivotal Moments in American History

Peter Goodchild, Murray Horowitz, Jonathan Estrin, Geoffrey Cowan, Leroy Aarons, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350135789
• eBook ISBN: 9781350135819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático americano

A unique play anthology featuring five gripping docudramas originally commissioned by L.A. Theatre Works that each explore pivotal moments in 20th century U.S history. With ensemble casts and innovative staging potential these plays are perfect for theatre companies, schools and educational groups looking to stage familiar historical stories in new and original ways. Each play is accompanied by dramaturgical notes that help contextualize and analyze both the events themselves and the dramatic form in which they are presented. The scripts included are:
The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial by Peter Goodchild
The Real Dr. Strangelove by Peter Goodchild
RFK: The Journey to Justice by Murray Horwitz and Jonathan Estrin
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial by Peter Goodchild
Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers by Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons (Winner of the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting Best Live Entertainment Award, 1992) As well as five scripts this anthology includes a foreword by Professor Michael Hackett, professor of directing and theatre history at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

Setting

1959–68

Original Live Theatre Production

RFK: The Journey to Justice by Murray Horwitz and Jonathan Estrin was originally commissioned and produced by L.A. Theatre Works, with generous support from the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at the University of Notre Dame, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, Stanford Lively Arts at Stanford University, and the Modlin Center for the Arts at the University of Richmond. Following an L.A. Theatre Works national tour, it was recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles in March 2010. It was directed by John Rubinstein. The cast was as follows:

Burke Marshall/Others	Michael Leydon Campbell
John F. Kennedy/Others	Philip Casnoff
Robert F. Kennedy	Henry Clarke
Byron White/Others	Kyle Colerider-Krugh
Martin Luther King, Jr.	Kevin Daniels
Harris Wofford/Others	Ross Hellwig
John Seigenthaler/Others	Thomas Vincent Kelly
Coretta Scott King/Others	Sheilynn Wactor
Louis Martin/Others	John Wesley

Producing Director Notes

Susan Loewenberg

When we received the offer to create an original L.A. Theatre Works docudrama from four of our outstanding and longtime presenters, the University of Notre Dame, Stanford, the University of Maryland, and the University of Richmond, we were elated and then challenged by the formidable task of choosing just the right subject. Despite the many ideas offered by our staff and the writers and academics we consulted, one subject kept coming back to me, perhaps because it also haunted me. I had unfinished business with Robert Kennedy.

As a graduate student in the history department at UCLA, I was, in 1968, taking a seminar on biography, taught by the late Fawn Brodie, whose biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Smith, and Richard Nixon, among others, were both well known and controversial, informed as they were by psychoanalytic theory and concepts.

For my seminar paper, I had chosen Robert Kennedy as my subject, and the intent of the paper was “to examine the major forces that have shaped Robert Kennedy’s personality and determined his pattern of behavior.” In short, under the influence of my professor, I had set myself the goal of “psychoanalyzing” RFK. Leaving aside the merits of this method as well as the merits or shortcomings of the paper, here is what happened.

It is June 4, 1968. I am sitting in front of the television, watching the post-presidential primary election party in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Robert Kennedy is giving a rousing victory speech and I am putting the finishing touches to my paper. I am literally on the last page. A little after midnight, as I am writing the final paragraph, sleepy yet exhilarated, Kennedy’s aides decide to take him through the kitchen and we see them leaving the ballroom. I can hear the local anchor announcing the entourage’s movements as they enter the kitchen. Then I watched in horror as chaos and confusion erupted on the screen and learned that the person I had intimately come to know had been gunned down. I struggled over the next few days to find an ending to the paper, but nothing seemed right. I had lost my objectivity, and I was in despair over the senselessness of his death. I ended the paper with this sentence: “But with the death of his brother John, the spotlight turned on him, and drawn to it like a moth to a flame, he didn’t have a chance.”

History and my own maturity have tempered those sentiments and given me a less simplistic perspective, as will this play.

Following Robert F. Kennedy’s Path to Justice

Elizabeth Bennett, Dramaturg and Researcher

In the spring of 1963, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, concerned about rising racial tensions in the North and South, and looking for fresh ideas on how to cope with civil rights problems, convened two meetings with African-American writer James Baldwin. Baldwin had been sharply critical of President John F. Kennedy for not being more forceful about the civil rights struggle gripping the United States. At the conclusion of the first meeting (held at Kennedy’s home in Virginia), Kennedy asked Baldwin to put together some of his “best people in New York” to “talk this whole thing over.” The group that met with Kennedy at his New York City apartment included Baldwin and his actor brother David, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry, singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, consul to the Gandhi Society Clarence B. Jones, and Freedom Rider Jerome Smith. The result was unexpected for both sides. Kennedy—publicly tight-lipped about the meeting—expressed privately his shock that his brother’s administration wasn’t lauded by blacks for its efforts, who told him that if this is the best he could do, then the best was not enough. Kennedy was humiliated by the group’s desperate laughter and surprised by so much anger. “We were a little shocked by the extent of his naïveté,” James Baldwin explained afterwards. Baldwin noted that he and his friends left the meeting convinced that Kennedy didn’t understand the full extent of the growing racial struggles in the North.

From this footnote to history comes the play that you will read. L.A. Theatre Works Producing Director Susan Loewe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction Michael Hackett
• The Great Tennessee Monkey Trial Peter Goodchild
• The Real Dr. Strangelove Peter Goodchild
• RFK: The Journey to Justice Murray Horwitz and Jonathan Estrin
• The Chicago Conspiracy Trial Peter Goodchild
• Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers Geoffrey Cowan and Leroy Aarons
• Copyright