Inside the gripping and timely revival of ‘Are You Now or Have You Ever Been’

Director Anna D. Shapiro and actors Brooks Ashmanskas, Jason Babinsky, and Adam Kantor unpack the chilling modern relevance of Eric Bentley’s docudrama about the 1940s Hollywood blacklist.

Summary

• Director Anna D. Shapiro and actors Brooks Ashmanskas; Jason Babinsky; and Adam Kantor discuss the modern relevance of the 1972 play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been
• The docudrama recreates the 1940s HUAC hearings using the verbatim historical transcripts
• The show illuminates themes of censorship; groupthink; fear; and political pressure

“How to be good in America feels like a real question to me right now,” said Tony Award-winning director Anna D. Shapiro. She brings that urgent inquiry to her latest project, a revival of the electrifying docudrama Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, scheduled to run through September 11 at New York City Center. Written in 1972 by the late, influential playwright Eric Bentley, who won a 2006 Lifetime Achievement Obie Award for his career-long drive to challenge audiences, the play drops viewers into the tense and perilous hearings of the 1940s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where figures from the entertainment industry were called to name suspected communists or risk getting blacklisted themselves.

Using only the original historical transcripts, the show presents a gripping confrontation between mid-century artists and government power, examining a climate of intimidation and moral conflict where fame offered no protection. Six actors perform for play's whole run — Michael McKean, Brooks Ashmanskas, Steven Boyer, Frederick Weller, Adam Kantor, and Jason Babinsky — alongside a rotating group of guest stars, including Bob Odenkirk, T. R. Knight, Steven Pasquale, and Molly Ringwald.

For Kantor, the opportunity to work on this historic piece was an immediate draw, largely because of the visionary at its helm. The actor recalled a time when, as a Northwestern University student, his class was invited to an early performance of a new, Shapiro-directed play at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

“We all couldn’t speak after,” Kantor said. “We were so blown away.” That play was the future Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County, and Kantor has been eager to collaborate with Shapiro ever since.

Now, under her direction, he is helping to unpack a story that resonates hauntingly with the current cultural moment, though the events of Are You Now took place decades ago. Shapiro finds the silencing of voices in the current era profoundly disturbing, viewing it not just as an echo of the past, but as a dire warning for the present.

“It’s a painful irony that we’re rehearsing and performing around the block from The Late Show and watching every day of Stephen Colbert’s last week,” Shapiro said. As performances have gotten underway, the play’s themes of censorship and media control have intersected with more real-time industry shakeups, such as the recent firing of Scott Pelley from 60 Minutes. For Shapiro, these events are stark reminders of the ongoing economic and political pressures that can dictate who gets a platform to speak.

Babinsky highlighted how, in the show as in real life, the committee members operate in an “almost heightened dialogue of interrogation.” Kantor reflected on how these historical tactics mirror today’s digital climate of public-pressure campaigns, noting that such ideological enforcement is not limited to one side of the aisle. “There’s a lot that’s strikingly familiar: public accusation, career destruction, this idea of canceling, this demand for public confession and renunciation, this naming of names,” he said. “What I find chilling is that this kind of machinery doesn’t belong to any one political ideology [...] The left does a version of it; the right does a version of it.”

According to Kantor, the ease of defining and condemning someone online only exacerbates the problem. “What HUAC understood, and what still holds true today, is that you don’t even need to prove guilt. You just need to make the accusation public, and social media today has really amplified this algorithm of defining somebody,” he noted.

After audiences witness the rapid-fire interrogations and shattered livelihoods depicted in Are You Now, the company hopes they leave with a renewed sense of empathy and vigilance. Babinsky opined that a lack of critical thinking was dangerous then and remains so today: “The biggest problem with any type of situation, whether it be during HUAC or now, is that we’ve lost the ability to look at nuance,” he said.

For Ashmanskas, the sheer weight of history carries an undeniable and emotional impact. “By the end of it, hopefully people are like, ‘Good god,’” Ashmanskas noted. He hopes the production serves as a reminder of what happened for a long time and will “inspire people to not stand for this at a time when we are, I believe, standing for it.”

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Photo credit: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been off Broadway. (Photos by Marc J. Franklin)