Joseph Stern
Kathleen Johnson ~ Allan Miller
present

ARE YOU NOW OR
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN
by Eric Bentley
directed by William Devane

A MESSAGE FROM ERIC BENTLEY

The dialogue of ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN was taken from hearings before the Un-American Activities Committee. No words are put in any witness's mouth which he or she did not speak or write. No resemblance between the witness and the actual person is coincidental. These "characters" (as we call people once they are presented on a stage) wrote their own lines into the pages of American history.

Though I did abridge and tidy up the record I did not write in any additional dialogue whatsoever. But since I did make one change which I myself originally hoped not to have to make, the least I can do is report what it was to you, my audience. During the ten years of our story, the membership of the Committee varied a good deal. A pure and literal documentary treatment would have to show a different group of men every few minutes—sometimes every few seconds. On TV that would be possible, though I think you would still reject it—as too confusing. In the theatre, no management is ever going to be able to afford that many actors anyway. What I have done is to present a single group of Committeemen. I have therefore to ask you to realize that each actor will be speaking lines of more than one person. There was another factor. The Committee had nine members. We have to make do with a smaller number. So, finally, the Committeemen are composite characters in TWO ways: first they represent a succession of Committeemen over the years 1947-1956; second they represent, in each session, a larger number of men than you will see on stage tonight. Be assured, though, that the main principle stated above is not violated: I have not inserted any words that were not used. Nor have I transposed any words from one session to any other.

My own sense of the continuing relevance of the Fifties can well be suggested by two quotes from Committee Chairmen of that decade. Chairman Wood:

If, by any action of this Committee, we could be instrumental in eliminating from the field of public entertainment the views of people, particularly the youth, who decline to answer a question as to whether they are members of the Communist Party, it would make me extremely happy.

And Chairman Walter, complimenting an ex-Communist singer who had named his former comrades:

Every patriot in the history of America has been proud of the enemies he has made. Your contribution here cannot be appraised. It may well be that it is equal to a division of infantry.

Cast (in Order of Appearance)

- WINNER, 1975 L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award:
Best Production
Direction (William Devane)
Featured Performance (David Spielberg)
Ensemble Performance

REVIEWS

An Ordeal by HUAC
by Dan Sullivan
L.A. TIMES, Tues, Feb. 18, 1975

The names, we are reminded at the outset of "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been" at the Cast Theater, are not coincidental. This is what Elia Kazan, Abe Burrows Lillian Hellman, Paul Robeson, etc., actually said to the House Un-American Activities Committee 20 years ago when "invited" to speak about communism in show business.

This is Larry Parks caving in, Arthur Miller sitting tight and Lionel Stander telling the honorable gentlemen where to put it.  But the purpose of Eric Bentley's documentary drama carved from his mammoth collection of on-the-record HUAC testimony, "Thirty Years of Treason," is not to make certain witnesses look bad or good. It is to present the committee as, itself, one of the more un-American activities of recent history.

It succeeds in this. We find ourselves sitting in a court where a "witness" is, in effect, a defendant against a devastating but unspecific charge of disloyalty to his country. He is not allowed to cross-examine his accusers or to call his own witnesses. His chief prosecutor is also the presiding judge. His testimony will be heard by the whole nation, which, moreover, assumes that he must be guilty or why would he be up there?

It is all very familiar. We think of Kafka. We think of the Stalinist trials of the late 1930s (the penalties much less severe here, of course—job loss but not death). We also may think of the Watergate hearings. If it is wrong to put an Arthur Miller through this, it is right to put a John Mitchell through it? The questions raised by the evening cut several ways. HUAC isn't all that it is about.

Psychologically, it is about what fear—put it more politely: pressure —does to people. William Devane's production of the play at the Cast is, I should say immediately, superb. And one of the reasons it is superb is its skill in showing us what each witness is going through, without making a judgment on him. It will leave that to us.

David Spielberg as Larry Parks, for instance (the cast is so well matched that you could pick almost anyone to make the point), absolutely defies categorization. He is simply a nice young man without the considerable resources needed to look the United States government in the eye and say, finally: No. "I'm asking you not to press me on this," he pleads time after time as the committee demands the names of others in Parks' Hollywood "cell" (whose chief activity seems to have been coffee parties).

But in executive session (later made public) he does give a few names, his hand over his mouth as though to deny the act even as he completes it. The committee then assures him that they have heard all the names before ... if that's any comfort  "It is no comfort at all, Spielberg whispers. The impulse is to tiptoe away and leave him by himself.

Although somewhat softer than Bentley's original script, this is not a sentimental production. One is not edified by the small-change brought to the committee by certain witnesses in hopes of proving their patriotism—Kazan's (Angelo Gnazzo) citing of a play he once did about a priest; Jerome Bobbins' (Beeson Carrol) speaking of the "American quality" of his dances. The actors let these statements speak for themselves and they do. As do the comical but basically desperate remarks of Abe Burrows (Alan Miller). HUAC did not bring out the best in people: Panic is the general theme here.

Some people didn't yield to it Jeff David's Arthur Miller is an icicle, Ethel P. O'Connell's Lillian Hellman a rock. "I will not cut my conscience to this year's fashions. To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself, is inhuman and indecent and dishonorable." Self-righteousness is the actors problem here. Both avoid it by projecting an anger so hot that it looks cold.

There were other methods of dealing with the committee. Stander (Allen Garfield) turns the hearing into a comedy, pretending to forget who the hell he was married to in 1935 and suggesting pleasantly, that, yes, he does know a bunch of creepy subversives: you guys. Paul Robeson (Charles Weldon) virtually plays with the committee, so far ahead of them in class and political sophistication that in the end he almost seems to be excusing them from further testimony.

It is an almost Chaucerian look at human nature in a corner, and this definitely includes the committee, reduced for dramatic purposes to three. M. Emmet Walsh as the chief investigator asks questions like a dull nurse taking a medical history. Ever been a Communist?  Ever had mumps? John Lehne as the chairman plays an iron-jawed, self-infatuated Mister District Attorney sworn to protect these shores from all enemies foreign and domestic. Byron Morrow as a committeeman is your white-haired father image, sympathetic but slightly prurient.  All of Washington is there.

As director, Devane keeps the tone faultless, the action moving ahead, the actors always thinking and always in true interplay. It is a mode of how theater-of-fact, or any theater, should be done. The close quarters of the Cast, turned into a courtroom by Barry Robison, give the experience a special intensity for both actors and audience. Some of the differences between Bentley's script and this arrangement can be perhaps questioned but that can wait for another time. "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been" is an absorbing evening, whatever your politics.

Gripping Analysis of the Un-American Dream
by Dan Sullivan
L.A. TIMES Calendar, March 2, 1975

The most disappointing thing about Los Angeles theater is the scarcity of first-rate small-theater productions. We have plenty of pocket theaters but most of what one sees there are workshop productions, as uneven as the talents of those who happen to belong to the workshop — which is often in no financial position to be choosy about its members. Comparisons between this scene and Off-Broadway won't be valid until the emphasis shifts from the actor's need to be seen to the audience's right to expect a good show, whatever the size of the house.

Since a good show is the best showcase, there need be no contradiction here. And recently we have had two fine examples of what can be done once small-theater gets out of the audition bag. The first was Theater West's production of Harold Pinter's "The Lover," as silky and authoritative an exploration of that tantalizing play as we are likely to see. The second is the new play at the Cast, "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?"

It is by Eric Bentley and it is a study of the recently departed House Un-American Activities Committee, drawn almost entirely from committee hearings. Its source is Bentley's 1,000-page book of HUAC transcripts, "Thirty Years of Treason" (Viking Compass: $5.50). But where the book's focus is general, that of the play is specific—the committee's investigation of subversion in the entertainment business, particularly Hollywood.

The point of the play is to persuade us that HUAC was a bad thing, a sort of civilian court-martial where the witness was really the defendant and the investigator really the prosecutor—and judge too. The charge, of course, was Communism.

It was a word so scary at the turn of the 1850s that it didn't matter whether a HUAC "witness" was being accused of running a Communist cell or being merely a "sympathizer." It didn't matter whether his activities were supposed to have ended in the 1930s or 1940s or continued to the present. It didn't matter that it wasn't technically illegal to be a communist, or that HUAC wasn't technically a court. In the mass mind and in the committee's mind, too (as is brought out very well in this production), it was a court. And until you proved you were innocent, you were guilty.

But since this wasn't technically a trial, since technically you were a witness, you couldn't use the weapons that a defendant in open court has, particularly the right to call his own witnesses and cross-examine those of the prosecution. The only way to clear yourself was to publicly repent—and as proof of your sincerity name those who had joined you in the conspiracy. The other alternatives were to take the Fifth Amendment (sure evidence in the mass mind that something funny was going on) or to refuse to appear at all, in which case you might be jailed for contempt of Congress (also possible if HUAC didn't like your attitude on the stand).

By bringing it all back home now that we can see the era with some objectivity, "Are You Now" reminds us how far HUAC departed from what we like to think of as American justice. It also reminds us that Congressional hearings still operate under these rules. If they were unfair then, are they any more fair now? Should we subject anyone—even Watergaters—to trial by television?

But "Are You Now" is not just a political document. It is a play—using real events, but still a play—about how different people respond to the same crisis. A disaster play, if you will. The disaster' here isn't an earthquake but a sincere handshake from one's boss at, say, Paramount, who wants you to know it's nothing personal but there's just nothing... available for you right now. The writers, actors and directors who went before HUAC knew that they faced the blacklist if their answers weren't cooperative, nay, fervent enough. How they responded to that threat is the psychological meat of Bentley's play.

It is both decent and artful of William Devane's cast to play no one as a villain here. Even when the answers are least admirable, one doesn't feel in a mood to throw stones. The actor shows you, without mush, the battle his witness has gone through to convince himself that this is, in a way, the truth. Self-deception rather than cynicism is the keynote (though Beeson Carroll's Jerome Bobbins does seem cynical, and his Sterling Hayden obviously hates what he's making himself do). Your resentment goes to a set-up which makes men fool themselves, rather than to the men.

David Spielberg's Larry Parks is particularly well-shaded. This is a sympathetic young man who wants to do the right thing but who also wants to be a "good" witness and keep his career. Finally — after a longer fight than one had realized —he capitulates and tells the committee the names it already has, regretting every syllable. Up to this point Spielberg has reminded us that this, like so many of the witnesses we've heard, is an actor, not above a bit of self-dramatization. But he is not looking at himself now. He is not looking at anybody. And it is hard to look at him. This is the stage's "private moment," used not only to illuminate but, perhaps, to absolve.

Some people, firmer in their principles or maybe just more ornery, stood up to HUAC. "Are You Now" celebrates them handsomely, but without too much fuss. Ethel P. O'Connell reads Lillian Hellman's stern letter to the committee: "I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbor..." Jeff David's Arthur Miller tells them that he will not bring trouble on another person, and if that's contempt of Congress, so be it.

Neither of these is played as a warm and wonderful figure: David, in particular, suggests dry ice. If these two intimidated the committee, they were probably also intimidated by it. Allen Garfield's Lionel Stander is intimidated by nothing. He sees HUAC as a bunch of county-courthouse boobs, and just when we need a relief from the play's gravity he tells them so.

Last we have Paul Robeson (Charles Weldon), probably the most together person of the evening, and not interested in playing token black for anybody. Robeson is fascinated at the kind of mind that could wonder why he's mad at Uncle Sam. Didn't he play football for Rutgers? Robeson tries to spell it out, throws his hands up. "You are the un-Americans!" he says. CHAIRMAN: The hearing is now adjourned! ROBESON: I should think it would be.

John Lehne's chairman—a composite of several real ones, including J. Parnell Thomas, who himself went to jail—is from time to time a little too obviously the bad guy. What's most excellent here is Lehne's projection of the politician as actor. This one has taken his model from the firm-jawed Mister District Attorney of radio fame. The hearings from his point of view are a long game of I'm OK/You're Wrong. As at real trials, you appreciate the theatricality of it. His supporting cast is M. Emmet Walsh, who doesn't know what to think of all these Hollywood weirdos but keeps plugging along, and Byron Morrow, who believes in sweet-talking suspects instead of roughing 'em up.

Obviously the play is slanted against the committee, but if Bentley has the gist of the hearings wrong, no one has called him on it yet. My problems with this production are minor. Parks issued a firm recantation of his party alliances two years after his testimony and that should be in the play as long as a similar statement by director Edward Dmytryk is there. The ending—a quote from Brecht's "Arturo Ui"—is demagogic and artistically off-key. Let the audience decide whether the bastards are in heat again and who they are. Theater of fact should stick to fact.

Other than that, this is a responsible piece of advocacy drama and a gripping human story too. It will, I hope, transfer from the 80-seat Cast to a 200 or 300-seat house soon. Meanwhile, the number to call is 462-0265. It will probably be busy.

"Are You Now" at Center Theater
by Sylvie Drake
L.A. TIMES, date unknown

A fresh visit to "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been" at the Hollywood Center Theater reveals a production that has become stronger, tighter, more integrated than ever.

The show's been running at that location for close to nine months and, before that, played several weeks at the tiny Cast Theater on El Centre. In the fall, some of the members of the local company traveled to Washington, D.C, where director Bill Devane staged a production of the play at Ford's Theater on a limited run basis.

But nowhere else—not at Ford's, not at Yale where the show originated in 1973, and not in New York where it had an inconspicuous run of several weeks at the Theater of Riverside Church—has "Are You Now" enjoyed the vigorous response it has experienced here.

This phenomenon may have everything to do with the fact that the subject matter—the relentless investigation of the Hollywood entertainment community by the House Un-American Activities Committee over roughly a decade —is on home ground. Lives in this town were, at the worst, shattered and, at the least, disrupted by those ignominious proceedings. Some people. like the late Larry Parks, never overcame the damage. Others like Jules Dassin went into self-exile. Still others, like Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller, stuck to their convictions and simply carried on.

It is to the credit of director Devane and his cast that this infinite variety of responses, all scrupulously true to the record, continues to be eloquently reflected in the performances at the Hollywood Center Theater. (We are warned early that no resemblance between witnesses and actual persons is coincidental. The language is entirely taken from the transcripts of the hearings though, granted, selectively excised and arranged by playwright Eric Bentley and further tightened by Devane.)

The production itself is documentary theater of the highest order, expertly staged and performed, with a power, a movement and a life rarely found on any stage.

Notable among changes in casting is Wynn Irwin's replacement of Allen Garfield as Lionel Stander. It is a totally different, flamboyant, almost raucous performance that brushes as close to parody as the confines of the situation will allow, but stops short of the kill. We get the sobering awareness that the fun and games are deadly serious and that real people were really being devastated by unconstitutional and self-righteous witch-huntings.

Jeff David, who continues in his impersonation of an unctuous Jose Ferrer and turns in a solemnly seething Arthur Miller, is quite remarkable in a new role: as the twitching, tense Martin Berkeley, the screenwriter single-handedly responsible for naming 162 names.

Jay Varela presents a rather straightforward Elia Kazan. William Burns, who replaces Besson Carroll as Sterling Hayden, also provides a consummately reserved and vainglorious Jerome Robbins. Tom Bower acquits himself honorably as Ring Lardner Jr. and screenwriter Marc Lawrence, while Maureen O'Toole lends the right note of sobriety to the reading of Lillian Hellman's famous letter to the committee preceding her appearance there. Sil Words' Paul Robeson is a figure to be reckoned with.

Of the old guard. David Spielberg is, if possible, even more shattering as the crumbling Larry Parks, and Allan Miller continues his superbly tongue-in-cheek portrayal of Abe Burrows.

It is, however, to John Lehne, the embodiment of several HUAC chairmen over the 10-year period, that a great deal of the praise must go. He relentlessly pursues the composite character of prosecutor with a constancy and intensity that does much to keep the dynamics of the production perpetually reeling. David Glennon and Jack Miller ably play his sidekicks.

If you think this kind of theater carries its own drama and is therefore easy to do, think again. The more dramatic the real-life situations, the less well they translate to the stage. No, the credit must go directly to the creators of "Are You Now": Bentley, Devane and this remarkable company of actors.

Negotiations are afoot for a TV special and possibly a film of this production—but if you haven't seen it onstage yet, don't wait. Audiences are thinning out and it may not be with us for very much longer.

Witch-Hunt in New Surroundings
by Sylvie Drake
L.A. TIMES, Tuesday, April 1, 1975

The new residency of "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been," at the Hollywood Center Theater on Las Palmas (where it has moved from the tiny Cast Theater), is fresh evidence that nothing succeeds like success.

The Eric Bentley play—or nonplay—which deals rigorously with the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation of the Hollywood entertainment community in the late '40s and early '50s, is similar evidence that nothing fascinates as much as a witch-hunt, particularly when it was conducted in your own backyard and all the principals arc well-known friends and neighbors.

In a manner of speaking, of course. But it is no coincidence (as we are told) that all resemblance between the characters in this drama-of-fact and the real people they represent is quite intentional. Bentley wrote none of the dialogue. The characters wrote their own in those turbulent days when the most un-American thing around was the House Committee itself. What the playwright did do is organize it into a workable piece of documentary theater, the more arresting for the fact that nothing is injected to detract from its own built-in power, most effective when least adorned.

No Trace of Personal Passion

Which brings us to the Joseph Stern-Kathleen Johnson-Allan Miller production under William Devane's admirably neutral and uncompromising direction.

It boasts a cast of splendid actors, each of whom displays an uncommon capacity for listening and reacting and a sobriety in performance that, again, allows the material to speak for itself without infusion of personal political passions.

The dramatized hearings focus chiefly on four "witnesses": Larry Parks (Philip R. Allen), Abe Burrows (Allan Miller), Lionel Stander (Allen Garfield) and Paul Robeson (Charles Weldon). But the choice morsels in between give the piece its diversity and bite. It is impossible not to respond to the displaced "patriotism" of Sam G. Wood (Robert Karnes), the advance and retreat of Edward Dmytryk (Jess Nadelman), the affirmative confusion—precisely—of Sterling Hayden (beautifully done by Beeson Carroll), the vainglories of Jose Ferrer (Jeff David), the spirit of Ring Lardner Jr. (Philip R. Allen) and the unshakable integrity of Lillian Hellman (Irene Robinson).

What emerges is a composite portrait of the effects of fear on honorable people, of profoundly confusing times, with values so turned up on end—persecution passing for patriotism, compromise for valor, valor for betrayal—that only the strongest, such as Hellman, managed to maintain a rational balance. How many among us, I wonder, could face blacklisting, loss of jobs, friends and status with unswerving equanimity?

A Deep Sense of Loss

Which is precisely what this play addresses itself to. The idea is not to judge but to understand. The longer and more developed testimonies arouse at the least compassion and at the most admiration, depending upon the resilience—moral, physical or psychological—of the individuals caught in this trap.

We observe the involuntary buckling of the cornered Parks with a deep sense of personal loss. Miller, in his depiction of Abe Burrows, never forgets that the man's complex and often hilarious rationalizations are genuinely human if desperate contortions. Slander's stand of total insurrection is quite mad and marvelous: he may be going down but he'll go fighting all the way. And Robeson's superior reasoning powers are a pure joy as he effortlessly outwits inquisitors bogged down in conventional thought and sloganeering.

Since Bentley did not write the dialogue, neither is he responsible for the sanctimony of this committee synthesized (for dramatic purposes) to a body of three. John Lehne (as chairman), Byron Morrow (as committeeman and—to a degree—ombudsman) and Paul Jenkins (as investigator) are the self-righteous challengers engaged in the vigorously misguided assault.

The simple courtroom set by Barry Robison and stark lighting by Bob Dye are excellent attributes to the production, which has transposed itself without any loss of punch into its larger quarters,

If less is more, Bentley and this production of "Arc You Now" are proving it every Friday (8:30 pm), Saturday (7 and 10 p.m.) and Sunday (7:30 p.m.) at 1451 N. Las Palmas in Hollywood (464-9921)—and may it be ever thus.

Understudies
Tom Bower, Angelo Gnazzo, Phillip R. Allen, Jess Nadelman,
Jeff David, Sil Words, Robert Karnes & Richard Burns

Production Staff
Producer - Joseph Stern
Stage Manager - Allen Williams
Company Manager - Carolyn Bye
Graphic Arts - George Yasuda
Technical Director - Leon Collin
Photography - Kevyne Baar

Presented at the Hollywood Center Theatre