‘Are You Now…’ Review: Arena’s Red Scare Falls Flat
The Hollywood blacklist drama boasts a solid cast, but its timely warnings get bogged down in dry testimony and earnest speeches.
The average American can’t tell you what a Communist believes but that has long been beside the point. Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?, by Eric Bentley, frames its docudrama retelling of the Hollywood Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s appropriately divorced from political ideology to hone in on morality.
Based on actual transcripts from House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the play — tastefully staged in Arena’s Kreeger Theater by Anna D. Shapiro (Tony-winner for August: Osage County) — examines the choices of those who faced a hostile HUAC and stood their ground, and those who cooperated, capitulated, and/or sold out dozens of friends.
That sounds like we’ve already chosen sides. The play sticks with the broad historical consensus on who were the good guys and the bad guys when the federal government descended on the lives of every actor, writer, director, artist, and studio executive in Hollywood to weed out the Reds.
Rather than re-trying the proceedings, the motive seems to be creating context that shows, as a society, we’re still sorting the lessons from this out-and-out witch-hunt. Branding your opponent a Communist regardless of their policies or stated beliefs might or might not be as effective as it was in the ’50s but it hasn’t gone out of style.
Judging by 2026 midterm campaigns, demonizing the opposition as some unidentifiable, unspeakably ugly Other can be twisted to suit many purposes. The accusers here, all right-wing Congressmen, are using the HUAC purportedly to protect America from its enemies within.
Silencing all supposed leftists, blacklisting “radicals” and homosexuals, and jailing anyone who defies the committee are just collateral benefits. Standing their ground also applies to the committee members, portrayed as a lineup of stern-faced suits, led by John Leslie Wolfe’s slick Chairman.
Wolfe lends a human, if conniving, face to the committee’s anti-Commie crusade, as they haul in one composer, famous director, or Oscar-winning screenwriter after another to testify on their possible Communist ties, and those of their associates.
While Wolfe plays sharp and steady foil to the succession of witnesses, the proceedings run a little dry, reliant less on character than earnest speechifying tailor-made to rally liberals around principles of standing up to right-wing fear-mongering.
Shapiro and set designer Andrew Boyce add energy and visual interest with a gallery behind the hearing-room wall, where witnesses each file in and take a seat after they’ve given testimony. Held in that purgatory, they’re a mix of wrongly accused and defiantly combative, righteously outraged and calmly cooperative.
Brittany Bland’s projections splash contemporaneous headlines across their faces: “Communists Have Suffered Serious Blow in Hollywood.” Some of the witnesses are distinguished by their famous names, but most by whether they snitch or keep their trap shut.
Filmmaker Sam G. Wood (Edward L. Simon) spills, while director Edward Dmytryk (Greg Stuhr) and screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. (Stephen Cefalu, Jr.) refuse to out their cronies, finding themselves part of the so-called Hollywood Ten who, in fact, served time in jail for defying the HUAC.
Lardner reads a persuasive statement on his own behalf, while actor Larry Parks (Aaron Bliden) delivers one of the play’s affecting moments defending a choice not to inform on friends. Then there’s Elia Kazan (also Simon) who confidently declares, “I want to tell you everything.”
Shapiro’s uniformly solid ensemble, many rotating through portraying multiple witnesses, put the speeches across with verve if not much fire.
Three witnesses stand out for at least changing up the atmosphere: jocular Broadway legend Abe Burrows (a vibrant Peter Jacobson) does it with humor; writer Lillian Hellman (Rivka Borek), as the only woman we see testify; and Renaissance man Paul Robeson (Kevin Mambo), the only Black character onstage.
Robeson’s testimony, rousingly performed by Mambo, holds the process in contempt, asserting his right as an American to claim this country as much as any white man on the committee. He puts it in terms likely to leave audiences cheering. What might have sounded radical then does not sound radical now, despite so many of the same forces still being at play — and Communism is not one of the forces we’re talking about here.
★★☆☆☆
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? runs through Dec. 6 at Arena Stage, 1101 6th St. SW. Tickets are $25 to $117, with discount options available. Call 202-488-3300, or visit arenastage.org.
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