Nearly 80 years ago, 10 directors, screenwriters, and producers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry (and jailed) after refusing to testify before a House committee about their possible affiliation with the Communist Party. It was a dark chapter in the history of the nation and of Hollywood — ruining the careers and reputations of both those who resisted the public shaming as well as, in subsequent years, those who either reluctantly or eagerly snitched on their peers.
Eric Bentley’s fact-based drama Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, which premiered in 1972 and is now getting a stirring and star-studded revival at New York City Center Stage 1, arrives at a moment that echoes that postwar period where politicians feel emboldened to try to shut down entertainers whose opinions they do not like. Late-night comedians, the hosts of The View, even venerable news shows like 60 Minutes are the new targets of a presidential administration eager to label opponents for commentary that isn’t so much anti-American as anti-MAGA.
Bentley, both a playwright and an influential critic, was a big champion of Bertolt Brecht and the “theater of fact” movement initiated by post-Brecht Germans that repackaged the historical record to resurface questions about culpability for the Holocaust. In Are You Now he adapts actual transcripts from the House Un-American Activities committee’s inquiries from 1947 to 1958, including the repeated use of what congressional interrogators called the “$64,000 question”: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
This was the height of the Cold War, where the Communist-led Soviet Union was considered an enemy of the U.S. fighting proxy battles in the Korea and elsewhere. Many American intellectuals and entertainers who had flirted with the philosophical appeal of Communism in the 1930s and ’40s — when the USSR was still an ally — had drifted away once the oppressive actions of the Soviets became more clear. But this was not enough for Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his acolytes in the House, bent on rooting out “commies” in all facets of American life, including Hollywood.
The story unfolds mostly chronologically, with early witnesses bobbing and weaving around their involvement with the party under questioning by a panel of three men representing Republican congressmen and committee staffers (Michael McKean is the senior blowhard of the group, while Jason Babinsky and Adam Kantor trade off as lawyerly interrogators). José Ferrer, an Oscar winner for 1950’s Cyrano de Bergerac played by Steven Boyer, improbably claims he had celebrated May Day without understanding its Communist connections.
And then we meet the erudite actor Larry Parks (Andrew McCarthy), who initially appears droll and relaxed, punctuating his parries to questions with a hand that gently holds a cigarette. But after his morning session bleeds into afternoon and then into evening — as we learn from Brittany Bland’s projections on Andrew Boyce’s stylized set re-creating a woody committee room — his equanimity disappears and he soon blurts out the names of eight people who attended Communist Party meetings with him in the early 1940s. McCarthy deflates before our eyes in a performance of heartbreaking subtlety.
Once Parks caves, the floodgates open. A parade of men take turns spilling names — some with great reluctance, in hopes of maintaining careers that have been jeopardized by the very fact that they’ve been called to Washington, and others with a rabid desire to fulfill a patriotic duty or to curry the favor the right-wing committee and their Hollywood bosses. The play doesn’t draw many distinctions between the two. Weeks after losing the Best Director Oscar for his work on A Streetcar Named Desire, Elia Kazan (Frederick Weller) notoriously seeks out the committee to snitch on Clifford Odets and other colleagues at the Group Theatre with gusto. Meanwhile, choreographer Jerome Robbins (Boyer again) also names names — though the play doesn’t note that he only agreed to testify after the committee threatened to publicly reveal his homosexuality. In the social and political climate of the 1950s, it was better to be red than pink.
Bentley may have been unaware of Robbins’ particular plight when he wrote Are You Now. But it’s a part of the historical record that sheds a different light on the choreographer’s actions (and the lengths to which interrogators went) than we see on stage. Director Anna D. Shapiro’s mostly absorbing production could do more throughout to contextualize events — and people — for 2026 audiences less familiar with the McCarthy/Red Scare era or one-time household names like Kazan, Paul Robeson, and Sterling Hayden. (As a critic, I received a “Character Guide” with bios of all the people named in the show; it’s sadly not even included in the digital program.)
Other scenes don’t hit with the same punch they might have a half century ago. When actor and Screen Actors Guild co-founder Lionel Stander turns up near the end to lambaste the committee itself for un-American activities, he also claims (without real evidence) that his chief accuser is a “psychopath” who will name anybody to get off the hook. Jay O. Sanders blusters his way through Stander’s grandstanding — but while he scores some rhetorical points, his testimony also comes off as messy, self-aggrandizing, and squirrely. It plays more like performative deflection than true bravery.
In contrast, Billy Eugene Jones brings a poised authority to the wronged progressive icon Paul Robeson, a trained lawyer as well as a renowned singer and actor who maintains his cool while unleashing a pointed defense of his Communist ties, his recent visits to the Soviet Union, and his advocacy on behalf of Black people worldwide. “In Russia I felt for the first time like a full human being. No color prejudice like in Mississippi. No color prejudice like in Washington,” he explains, while adding that as the son of a slave whose “people died to build this country” he has no intention of forsaking his American citizenship. His righteous indignation is electric.
The revolving chair of witnesses become a bit interchangeable over time. As if to underscore the point, many cast members will swap out over the show’s summer run, with Santino Fontana, T.R. Knight, Harry Lennix, Bob Odenkirk, Steven Pasquale, Molly Ringwald, and Thomas Sadoski all expected to take turns in the committee room. Weller plays no fewer than five characters, including Arthur Miller, who channeled his enmity toward the Communist witch hunt into his 1953 masterpiece The Crucible. (The actor admirably shifts his voice and posture to suit each role.)
Most of the performers who stand out are assigned a single role. In addition to McCarthy and Jones, Sally Murphy combines conscience and cosmopolitanism in her brief turn as Lillian Hellman, while David Krumholtz brings an irrepressible gift of gab to Abe Burrows, the Guys and Dolls co-writer who could talk the ear off a corn stalk. He’s hilarious, boasting about his achievements and fame while also admitting he was not just naive but “stupid” to have gotten caught up in the Communist Party at all. He names names, often with a cocktail-party anecdote attached, and hedges on whether he officially joined the party. His coyness, we learn, led Paramount to drop its option on Guys and Dolls. We don’t learn, though, that the hardship was short-lived: MGM made the film less than two years later.
Bentley saves his most strident speeches for the end, which tilts the balance of the drama. Like the HUAC committee itself, the show tends to spin its wheels while dropping fascinating nuggets of insight, outrage, and hypocrisy. After hearing the interrogators mock witnesses for invoking the Fifth Amendment, for instance, the show reveals that one-time committee chair J. Parnell Thomas invoked that right when he was tried for corruption — and later spent time in the same prison with screenwriter and Hollywood 10 member Ring Lardner. It’s enough to bolster the hope that history might repeat itself in at least one respect: that for some of those coming after Kimmel, Colbert, and the like a well-deserved uppance might be coming. ★★★☆☆
ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN
New York City Center Stage 1, Off Broadway
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through Sept. 11 for $99 to $179