Beck, Doyle Of Law And Order: SVU Lead Cast In BETRAYED

Original New York cast members Jeremy Beck, Mike Doyle (Law and Order: SVU), Sevan Greene and Waleed F. Zuaiter head the cast under the guidance of original director Pippin Parker when L.A. Theatre Works presents the West Coast premiere of Betrayed, the haunting new play by award winning writer and journalist George Packer. Five performances take place February 18-22 at the Skirball Cultural Center where they will be recorded to air on LATW's nationally syndicated public radio theater series, The Play's The Thing.

In early 2007, George Packer published an article in The New Yorker about Iraqi interpreters who jeopardized their lives on behalf of the Americans in Iraq, yet were provided with little or no U.S. protection or security. The article drew national attention to the humanitarian crisis and moral scandal. Based on Mr. Packer's interviews in Baghdad, Betrayed tells the story of three young Iraqis - two men and one woman - who were motivated to risk everything by America's promise of freedom. The award-winning play explores their complex relationships with each other and with their American supervisor as they struggle to find purpose even as their country collapses around them.

"The voices of the Iraqi men and women I met were so powerful that even after I finished The New Yorker article, they wouldn't leave me alone," Packer said in an interview. "These Iraqis put their trust in us, went to work with us, risked their lives to work with us - and nothing is riskier in Iraq than working with Americans - and as they began to come under threat, we essentially walked away from them and left them on their own. It's of a piece with everything that's wrong with this war."

Betrayed opened at New York's Culture Project on February 6, 2008, garnering the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding New Play and a nomination for the John Gassner Award by the Outer Critics Circle. Betrayed was a New York Times Critic's Pick, and John Simon wrote in New York Magazine, "Powerful and moving... every American should see it."

George Packer became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 2003 and has covered the Iraq War for the magazine. His book "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq," was named one of the ten best books of 2005 by the New York Times and won the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award and an Overseas Press Club's book award. He has also written about the atrocities committed in Sierra Leone, civil unrest in the Ivory Coast, the megacity of Lagos, and global counterinsurgency. In 2003, Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards, one for his twenty-thousand-word examination of the difficulties faced during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, which appeared in November, 2003, and the other for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone, which appeared in January, 2003. Packer is also the author of "The Village of Waiting" (1988), about his experience in Africa. His book "Blood of the Liberals" (2000), a three-generational nonfiction history of his family and American liberalism in the twentieth century, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also written two novels, "The Half Man" (1991) and "Central Square" (1998). Packer has served in the Peace Corps in Togo, West Africa, and was a 2001-02 Guggenheim Fellow. He has contributed numerous articles, essays and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics and literature to the New York Times Magazine, Dissent, Mother Jones, Harper's and other publications. He has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia.

For three decades, L.A. Theatre Works has been the leading radio theater company in the United States, committed to using innovative technologies to preserve and promote significant works of dramatic literature and bringing live theater into the homes of millions. LATW's radio theater series, The Play's The Thing, airs weekly on 89.3 FM KPCC Southern California Public Radio, and is streamed on the KPCC website for one week following each broadcast. The series can also be heard on 89.7 WGBH in Boston; 91.5 FM WBEZ in Chicago; 94.9 KUOW in Seattle; 93.5 FM KRTS "Marfa Public Radio" in Texas; 90.5 FM KUT in Austin; 88.9 FM KUNM in Albuquerque; 91.5 FM, Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan; 94.1 KPFA in Northern California; 91.1 FM KRCB in Sonoma County; 89.1 KUOR in Redlands; as well as on many other public radio stations nationwide. Selected programs from LATW are also heard internationally over BBC World Service, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio Telefis Eirann (Ireland), Radio Hong Kong, and Radio New Zealand.The L.A. Theatre Works Audio Theatre Collection is available in bookstores, libraries, through their catalog, digitally on itunes, overdrive.com, audible.com, and on the L.A. Theatre Works website at www.latw.org.

Performances of Betrayed take place on Wednesday, February 18 at 8 pm; Thursday, February 19 at 8 pm; Friday, February 20 at 8 pm;Saturday, February 21 at 2:30 pm;and Sunday, February 22 at 2 pm. Tickets range f rom $20.00 to $48.00. The Skirball Cultural Center is located at 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd, off the San Diego (405) Freeway in the Santa Monica Mountains (exit Skirball Center Drive). For tickets and information, call the L.A. Theatre Works box office at (310) 827-0889 or go to www.latw.org.