Angeleno’s play wows Edinburgh

LOS ANGELES-based playwright Simon Levy’s docudrama “What I Heard About Iraq,” co-produced by the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, has won a Fringe First Award for outstanding new writing at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The annual August jamboree, the world’s largest arts festival, will conclude Monday.

Levy’s unapologetically antiwar play, subtitled “A Cry for Five Voices,” was adapted from an article by Elliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books, quoting soldiers and military strategists, politicians, Iraqis and others verbatim about the U.S. military’s role in Iraq.

In a Times interview in March, regarding public readings of both the play and the article that took place worldwide on the third anniversary of the U.S. Iraq invasion, Levy described his reaction to what he called Weinberger’s “cognitive map of the war.... When I read it, it was like an explosion went off in my head -- and my heart.”

Reviewing the play’s world premiere at the Fountain Theatre for The Times in September, F. Kathleen Foley called it “an often stunning distillation of American hubris and denial.” The Fringe First Award citation reads: “Of all the verbatim shows on this year’s Fringe, ‘What I Heard About Iraq’ is the most hard-hitting.... The basic thesis is that our leaders have had no consistent view of Iraq at all, lie constantly, and lie about the lies.”

BBC Radio has commissioned a radio dramatization of the play for April.

-- Lynne Heffley