I’m starting to get damn tired of how relevant so many plays written or set decades ago continue to be today. The Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman feels painfully contemporary in its damning portrait of a rapacious capitalistic society that doesn’t take care of people who’ve worked hard their entire lives. And now the off-Broadway revival of Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, depicting hearings of the congressional Un-American Activities Committee from 1947 to 1956, has arrived to remind us that government suppression of free speech didn’t originate in the Trump era.
Eric Bentley’s acclaimed 1972 verbatim drama cherry-picks selected testimony from a gallery of show-business figures, some still famous and others not so well known, brought before the committee headed by congressman J. Parnell Thomas (a suitably smarmy Michael McKean), who, irony of ironies, later went to prison for corruption. Even more ironically, Parnell served his sentence in the same prison as two members of the Hollywood Ten whose convictions he helped secure.
Much like the current Broadway incarnation of Celebrity Autobiography, this production features a strong ensemble of estimable actors, with others joining later in the run as some rotate out. It’s a canny casting strategy that might prove gimmicky if the performances aren’t consistently strong.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Several of the actors play more than one witness, demonstrating their versatility as they change their voices and mannerisms along the way. Frederick Weller embodies such disparate types as Sterling Hayden, who initially cooperated with the committee and hated himself for it afterwards, disgustedly describing himself as “a rat, a stoolie,” and Elia Kazan, who oozes self-satisfaction as he declares, “I want to tell you everything” while the committee members obsequiously fawn over him.
It’s refreshing to see expert comic actor Brooks Ashmanskas demonstrate his dramatic chops with his turns as, among others, Hollywood labor organizer Tony Kraber, who treated the committee defiantly, and screenwriter Martin Berkeley, who offered up more than 150 names. Stephen Boyer excels as Jerome Robbins, who provided names (“according to my conscience”) and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr., who refused to answer the titular question and was declared in contempt of Congress.
Andrew McCarthy delivers a haunting turn as actor Larry Parks, at first declining to name names and then crumbling as he realizes that his career will be over no matter what he does. Alternatively, David Krumholtz proves hilarious as writer Abe Burrows (Guys and Dolls), who attempt to deflect the committee’s questions with sly, Borscht Belt-style humor.
Other standouts include Jay O. Sanders, perfectly embodying Lionel Stander with his colorful turn in which the blustery actor spits every time he mentions the name of his “psychopath” accuser Marc Lawrence, and Billy Eugene Jones, radiating dignity as a defiant Paul Robeson who repeatedly invokes the Fifth Amendment while pointedly reminding the committee that it does not infer criminality.
Sally Murphy also shows up briefly as a chain-smoking Lillian Hellman who, in a letter to the committee refused to name names and famously declared, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
Not all of the excerpted testimony proves compelling, and inevitably some repetition sets in. But Are You Now or Have You Ever Been remains a powerful distillation of an historical record of a shameful time in American history. The piece is beautifully served in this powerful staging by Anna D. Shapiro (August: Osage County), enhanced by informative, newspaper-headline projections by Brittany Bland and period-perfect costumes and hair/wig designs by Johanna Pan and Brittany Hartman respectively.
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been opened June 2, 2026, at City Center Stage I and runs through September 11. Tickets and information: areyounowplay.com
