Be Afraid. In Fact, Be Very Afraid.

As the evening shadows deepen, Donald Freed tells a ghost story.

It’s about a Panamanian strongman and overlord of drug trafficking--a man Americans tried to laugh off as Pineapple Face. But Manuel Noriega scared U.S. leaders badly enough for them to send troops after him. He was hunted down, then hauled to the States for trial and, ultimately, a jail term.

Well, some things can’t be locked away in a cell, Freed cautions. His tone is dire, yet he looks content as can be, folded into a wingback chair and smoking a pipe in his Brentwood living room.

“Noriega lives on. He is going to come back yet to haunt this country. The truth about the Cold War--especially the Iran-Contra, Reagan-Bush years--is like a mole under the floorboards.

“All our Cold War monsters that we set up and then tore down--it’s not so easy. It’s not like a play; you can’t just strike the set on Sunday night. Mr. Hussein. Mr. Noriega. Mr. Mobutu. Oh, no, there’s an accounting coming. The Cold War may be over, but what is set in motion by that Cold War is a long way from over.”

Freed, a playwright provocateur and social historian, writes about all of this in “The General & the Archbishop,” which begins previews Thursday at the Victory Theatre in Burbank. The play imagines what took place inside the Vatican embassy in Panama City when Noriega sought sanctuary there on Christmas Eve 1989. As American troops blast taunts over a PA system in a crude attempt to flush out Noriega, the archbishop tells him, in essence: “We look for bright boys like you on the make, and we set you up to do our dirty work. And now, it’s time to tear you down.”

What kind of dirty work? “We called it anti-communism,” Freed says. “In fact, it was nothing but a lust for power.” He promises that by play’s end audiences will “be led into sanity and clarity by none other than the mad dictator Manuel Noriega.”

The faintest trace of a smile forms at the corners of his mouth. Then a laugh erupts as he adds: “That ought to discourage a few ticket-buyers.”

Freed writes things that push people’s buttons, the best-known of which is the Richard Nixon mock confessional “Secret Honor.” But mostly, this affable 65-year-old is just trying to get people thinking--to get them asking questions about everything from the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial to CIA activity in Central America.

“That part of life we call politics has been censored and abstracted out of American theater” since the Communist witch hunts of the ‘50s, he says. “The fact that I’m putting it back in, then, strikes some people as politics-as-propaganda.”

He is fond of mentioning, with what seems like pride, that the FBI and CIA tracked him after a couple of his projects. “I never had any doubt that playwriting is taken very seriously in this country by certain elements,” he says.

He also writes investigative history books, such as the recent “Killing Time,” in which he and scientist Raymond P. Briggs chart the evidence of the Nicole Brown Simpson-Ronald Goldman murders against a timeline. An earlier book, “Executive Action” (written with Mark Lane), became a 1973 movie that--two decades before Oliver Stone’s “JFK”--suggested the Warren Report didn’t tell the whole story about the Kennedy assassination.

“Oliver Stone is doing in film what I am doing in theater; we’re breaking some of the same taboos,” Freed says.

Stone has paid a high price for it, Freed acknowledges. Since “JFK,” the filmmaker has become “a guaranteed late-night gag.”

Freed bristles at the thought that some of his own ideas might be dismissed as conspiracy theories. “I say that ‘conspiracy’ is the cheapest word in the American lexicon,” he intones. “When someone frightens us, we call [it] conspiracy, and when we approve of an activity, we call it solidarity.”

In a deep, rumbling voice, Freed spins out mini-lectures that go on for a quarter-hour and more, almost as if he were in front of one of his playwriting classes at USC or dramatic literature classes at Loyola Marymount University.

Friend and fan Julie Harris, who has acted in two of his plays, says: “He lives in his mind so much--more so than most other people. . . . If you had the strength to sit up all night listening, he could keep on talking, I think.”

Maria Gobetti, who is directing “The General & the Archbishop,” adds: “His passion for freedom and his passion for theater are two running streams. . . . He’s doing something very dangerous in his work, which is mixing art and politics. He really believes that art can make a difference in the way people think about their government and their religion.”

That’s a topic that really gets Freed talking.

Theater “says ‘no’ to the propaganda of the state,” he declares. “What we have are the official lies of the church and the state against the poetic lies of the playwright and the artists of the theater. The scenario of the state has guns behind it,” he says, holding up his hands as though to surrender. “The scenario of the theater has no power whatsoever beyond the word and the image. And yet . . . “

Given such strong views, it comes almost as a surprise that the real-life figures in his plays--Noriega, Nixon, Adolf Eichmann and others--are fully dimensional, achingly human characters with whom viewers can and do empathize.

“The reason we feel terror and pity for these monsters,” he says, is because “they act out the dreams and nightmares of our time. It’s ourselves we’re seeing there.”

A significant portion of Freed’s career was linked to producer/director Bill Bushnell and the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre, which became the resident company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. The plays that emerged from that decade-long association in the ‘80s include “The White Crow,” “The Quartered Man” and “Alfred and Victoria.”

But by far the most widely known is “Secret Honor” (written with Arnold M. Stone), which imagines a post-Watergate Nixon alone with a bottle of booze, a tape recorder and the tortured memories he spits into its microphone. Robert Altman took the show off-Broadway, then directed it as a film.

A couple of other plays from that period didn’t end up on Bushnell’s stages but appeared elsewhere. Spurred along by British playwright Harold Pinter, “Veterans Day” was presented on London’s West End starring Jack Lemmon. (That play, about three vets who declare war against the war-makers, has never been staged in Los Angeles, but the new Venture West Theatre Co., which performs on the VA grounds in West L.A., has scheduled it for the fall.) “Circe & Bravo” had a small production at the Met Theatre in Los Angeles and also made it to London, where Faye Dunaway played a justifiably paranoid fictitious first lady.

Tracing his interest in the theater, Freed shares a memory from about age 6, when his family lived in the small town of Eagle River, Wis.

“I was at the counter at Zimpleman’s Soda Fountain after having just seen a matinee of a cowboy picture. And I was brooding--like the villain I had seen in the cowboy picture--over my water, and I remember my mother walking in and saying to Mrs. Zimpleman, ‘I wonder who he is today?’ ” He laughs.

In many ways, he’s still that little boy, trying to get inside someone else’s life to see what it’s like. “It wasn’t beaten out of me or educated out of me. I was a hard case, and I never became respectable and never traded away or gave up the wild and radical visions of childhood, which I take to be the truth. I have paid for it, politically and commercially. But it has been cheap at the price.”

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“THE GENERAL & THE ARCHBISHOP,” Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Dates: Previews begin Thursday. Opening date still to be announced. Regular schedule: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 8. Prices: $18-$20; previews, $16. Phone: (818) 841-5421.