1970s ‘Trial’ mirrors contemporary war issues

In an action that galvanized the Vietnam War protest movement, nine people, including Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, raided a Maryland draft board in 1968 and burned thousands of Selective Service records.

In 1971, Berrigan’s free-verse dramatization of the event and the group’s subsequent prosecution, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” premiered at the Mark Taper Forum. Director Gordon Davidson played a taped speech by the absentee playwright, who had gone underground after being sentenced to prison.

On Saturday, Davidson, who retired as Center Theatre Group’s founding artistic director in 2005, will revisit the play that became one of his signature works, directing a reading at CTG’s Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City with an all-star cast: Martin Sheen, Tim Robbins, Beau Bridges, Mike Farrell, Camryn Manheim and Sandra Oh.

Proceeds from the event, which includes a post-show discussion and a reception with the cast, will benefit the Office of the Americas and Robbins’ theater company, the Actors’ Gang.

“When I read it again, I was struck by how contemporary it is about war, about poverty, about government,” said Davidson, who took the play to Broadway in 1972 and directed a film version produced by Gregory Peck, with Ed Flanders as Berrigan.

As a reading, Saturday’s event will be “really more of a dialogue with the audience,” Davidson said, performed by actors who “have a good sense of what the issues are now, so they’ll bring that passion to it.”

“For now, just to explore the material is interesting,” Robbins said. “Unfortunately, it’s still relevant, in that it’s still calling into question the morality of American foreign policy.”

He is dismayed that “people 50 and 60 years old, people that were out there on the streets protesting against the war in the ‘60s, are now saying the same things that were said to them: ‘We’re there now so we have to finish the job,’ or ‘What are we going to do, just pull the troops out?’

“That’s what’s most disappointing,” he said. “To hear that same litany of rationalizations used in the ‘60s that kept us there for a good four or five or six years past when we should have been there. And the tens of thousands of deaths that resulted because of that rationalization, that political expediency.”

Robbins said that a fully staged production of the play is a future possibility.

- Lynne Heffley