In this fraught year of the nation’s semiquincentennial, political theater is not exactly all the rage. Audiences are stressed out — desperate for comedy, not confrontation. So the prevailing wisdom says, anyway.
But what if that confrontation involved the great singer-actor Paul Robeson absolutely trouncing his congressional interrogators on the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee? Or the playwright Lillian Hellman at her most blisteringly principled, refusing to harm anyone by cooperating with the investigation into the entertainment industry? Or the choreographer-director Jerome Robbins, a former communist making the opposite decision, doling out names of ostensibly red associates like candy?
“I feel I am now doing the right thing as an American,” Robbins testifies to the committee in Eric Bentley’s 1972 drama, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been,” which the playwright constructed from copious testimony stretching from 1947 to 1956.
As Bentley notes in his preface to the play, the “characters wrote their own lines into the pages of history” — which he abridged and tidied in his script, but did not invent. Thus “no resemblance between the witness and the actual person is coincidental.” The three committee members, including the chairman, are composites of multiple real people.
Anna D. Shapiro’s revival, at New York City Center Stage 1, is theater to make the blood boil, and it means to be, as audience members watch historical figures living through a past whose echoes we can recognize in our present. Such as when the committee chairman (Michael McKean) loses his patience with a resistant Ring Lardner Jr. (Steven Boyer).
The chairman goads him: “Any real American would be proud to answer the question, ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’ — any real American!”
Lardner counters: “I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.”
What the committee’s targets can live with is one of the threads that runs through the testimony. Another is what they can’t live without — like the ability to make a living in their chosen field, which being blacklisted as a communist might well end permanently.
As the movie star Larry Parks (Andrew McCarthy) tells the congressmen, “To be called before this committee has a certain inference, a certain innuendo, that you’re not loyal to this country. This is not true.”
McCarthy imbues Parks with a quality some actors have of dimming their luminosity when they aren’t performing. A thoughtful man, sure of his own moral core, Parks seems to get smaller as he testifies, his resolve eroding along with his dignity. Determined not to fold, he folds. There is such quiet sadness in his capitulation.
Shapiro’s production uses a core cast of six — anchored by McKean, his chairman like a snake coiled to strike — plus five more actors who join the show for shorter runs, playing major witness roles. The current members of the rotating cast are McCarthy, David Krumholtz and Jay O. Sanders, all appearing through June 21, and Sally Murphy and Billy Eugene Jones, appearing through July 12.
Actors on deck for the rotating roles include Scott Adsit, Thomas Sadoski, Steven Pasquale, Harry Lennix, Molly Ringwald, Bob Odenkirk and Norbert Leo Butz — which is one way of enticing audiences toward political drama.
Shapiro’s current company is highly polished, making each of the many witnesses distinct. Text occasionally projected upstage on Andrew Boyce’s set provides additional historical orientation, though it would be more helpful if the audience had just a little longer to read it. (Projection design is by Brittany Bland.)
It is a slow burn of a show, worthy of your attention. Krumholtz makes the equivocating playwright-director Abe Burrows (“Guys and Dolls”) one of the slipperiest characters you’ll ever meet, introducing a welcome note of levity in testimony both self-serving and self-incriminating. In Sanders’s portrayal, the character actor Lionel Stander is funny, too, and heartbreaking, appearing before the committee in desperation to revive his career.
As Hellman, trying to negotiate with the chairman by letter, Murphy breathes a tiny role wholly to life, and speaks perhaps the most famous line of all: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
But Jones’s calm, methodical, intellectual Robeson is the one who turns the play at last into a thrilling conflagration. Of all the witnesses, he is the only one who is entirely unafraid.
“I am here because I am opposing the neo-fascist cause,” he tells the committee.
One gets the sense that that’s why the revival is here as well.
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been
Through Sept. 11 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; areyounowplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
www.nytimes.com