Anna D. Shapiro revives HUAC drama with rotating all-star cast

Anna D. Shapiro has brought Eric Bentley’s HUAC drama back to the stage at New York City Center Stage I, where a rotating all-star cast is giving fresh urgency to a 1972 docudrama built from congressional hearing transcripts. The limited 15-week engagement opened June 2 and is set to run through September 11, with Brooks Ashmanskas, Harry Lennix, Bob Odenkirk, Steven Pasquale, Molly Ringwald, Thomas Sadoski, Michael McKean, Andrew McCarthy and Santino Fontana among the performers moving through the production.

Bentley’s Are You Now or Have You Ever Been was assembled from testimony taken during House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, and production materials note that it draws on accounts from more than a dozen figures in show business. The play reaches back to the Red Scare years, when HUAC, established in 1938, investigated alleged communist activity through the 1940s and 1950s and turned its attention to Hollywood in 1947.

That Hollywood inquiry produced the Hollywood Ten, 10 motion-picture writers, producers and directors who refused to testify before HUAC in October 1947 and were convicted of contempt of Congress. Their punishment became one of the defining episodes of the blacklist era, with names such as Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo still attached to the history of coercion in the entertainment business.

The revival lands with particular force because the machinery of public accusation is not confined to the mid-20th century. The production is being framed around the same anxieties that made HUAC infamous: political pressure, censorship fears, loyalty tests and the demand that people denounce others in order to protect themselves. Shapiro’s staging asks modern audiences to sit with the moral cost of naming names, not just the mechanics of a history lesson.

Bentley, who died on August 5, 2020, at 103, had seen the play reach Broadway before. It played the Century Theatre in 1979 for 32 performances under director John Bettenbender, and this return places the work back in New York with a cast and context built to make the old transcript read like a warning for the present.