In Radio Drama, the Ears Have It : Series: Karel Capek’s ‘The White Plague’ tonight launches KCRW-FM’s ‘The Play’s the Thing,’ featuring an all-star--albeit invisible--cast.

Director Peggy Shannon works with many of the best actors in town but she never watches them act. That’s because, nestled away in a control booth with a headset, her eyes shut, she’s listening to them. It’s not important what her actors look like.

Shannon produces radio theater for L.A. Theatre Works, which tonight launches the first of 18 weekly broadcasts of two-hour plays recorded before a live audience. The series, with the umbrella title of “The Play’s the Thing,” will be heard Saturdays at 8 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9).

The series’ opener is a prophetic Orwellian horror story, ostensibly about Hitler, by Czech futurist Karel Capek. The drama is “The White Plague,” translated by Michael Henry Heim with clear and present vibrations (the Persian Gulf War, AIDS, dictatorships, you name it).

The large cast features Robert Foxworth as the arrogant, self-serving head of a clinic for lepers, and Joe Spano as a peace-loving physician/martyr with a cure for the lethal disease, which has begun to engulf the world. The afflicted, with white splotches on their skin, are confined to camps. But the government doesn’t really want the good doctor’s cure. It wants a war.

The political allegory, written in 1938 and blacklisted until the 1950s, is simplistic but awfully eerie. This gadfly of a work certainly kicks off the series with a sociopolitical point of view.

L.A. Theatre Works is the group that a few years ago brought the riches of American literature to the airwaves with broadcasts of the entire texts of Sinclair Lewis’ satirical novel “Babbitt” and Frank Norris’ “McTeague.”

The troupe, under the impetus of current producing director Susan Loewenberg and Judith Auberjonois (founding member Rene Auberjonois’ wife), originated in the mid-’80s as a company of classically trained actors who read plays together. It was company member Richard Dreyfuss’ quaint idea to record their readings for radio broadcasts. Now they’re doing world and West Coast premieres for non-commercial KCRW; some may be picked up by National Public Radio.

“What’s unique about our current venture,” said the LATW’s associate director Shannon (who’s helming most of the 18 shows), “is that we’re making our series a forum for comparatively new playwrights (the late Capek notwithstanding). And we’re co-joining live play readings with studio-produced broadcasts.”

Among the world premieres are Jack LoGiudice’s “In the Moonlight Eddie,” Sachi Oyama’s “Oyakoshinju: Deathbound” and Stephanie Fleischmann’s “Questa.”

The shows are recorded before the public in the Carousel Ballroom of downtown Santa Monica’s Guest Quarters Suite Hotel, which KCRW technicians have turned into a radio studio.

Among the company’s nearly 50 members are Ed Asner, Stacy Keach, JoBeth Williams, Shelley Berman, Marsha Mason, Ed Begley Jr., Michael York, Bonnie Bedelia, Hector Elizondo, Amy Irving, Judge Reinhold, Shirley Knight, Joyce Van Patten and Georgia Brown. Many of them feel much safer doing live radio drama than appearing on a live stage in a Los Angeles theater.

With L.A. Theatre Works, however, you won’t hear the acting credits announced until the shows are over. That’s a double-edged sword, though: You focus on the character, not the performer, but when some of the voices sound alike (as is the case with the premiere broadcast), it can be frustrating.

The audible response from a live studio audience can also be distracting. It was probably humorous for an audience to watch Foxworth’s “White Plague” villain huff and puff, but for the serious listener at home, the laughter can be confusing.

Concentrating so hard on language, of course, can be a shock to the system for those used to watching their entertainment on stage or screen. But without question, these broadcasts revive the richness of words.

“I look for plays that have a strong use of language,” said Shannon. She added that the transition to radio can mean a huge readjustment for some writers weaned on cinema and even theater. For Tom Topor’s “Cheap,” an adaptation of “The Miser,” for instance, Shannon said she had to ask him to rework it because “radio can’t do physical farce. We had to reflect the farce in language. If a play is too theatrical, it’s not a radio piece.”

“Cheap,” which updates the Moliere play to New York’s present-day Little Italy, stars Ed Asner and is scheduled for broadcast June 15.