The interrogators themselves called it “the $64 question,” in joking reference to the TV game show of the day: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” Members of the House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee–HUAC, as it came to be known–asked the question of a stream of witnesses during a ten-year period starting in 1947. It was the era of the cold war and Korea, an era when politicians found that a good way to make national reputations for themselves was to proclaim their intention to weed out “communist influences” in the arts–and an era in which artists found themselves challenged to submit to HUAC’s inquiries about themselves and their friends, or to defy HUAC on constitutional grounds. The result of the latter action was frequently the derailment or destruction of their careers, as film and TV producers set up a blacklist to deflect governmental harassment and public disapproval.
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Those days seem long gone. Certainly the events of that period are increasingly forgotten as new generations come through an American educational system wary or incapable of discussing controversial issues. Anna Shapiro and Tom Bell, both 24, recall hearing virtually nothing in high school about the anticommunist inquisition of more than 30 years ago. Bell and Shapiro are artistic codirectors of Big Game Theater, a small Rogers Park-based company entering its second season with Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, Eric Bentley’s docudrama based on the HUAC investigation of “communist influences” in show business. Shapiro directs the play; Bell, one of the 17-person cast, plays HUAC staff investigator Richard Arens. Preparing the production, which opens Friday, was more of a learning experience than they anticipated.
Now, of course, pundits proclaim that the cold war is over. But Shapiro and Bell find a troubling relevance in this depiction of those political battles. “They were trying to silence artists,” says Shapiro of the conservative politicians who led the anticommunist charge, “and it’s happening again now.” The issue in 1950 was Communist Party membership; today, it’s obscenity. The real target in both cases, Shapiro and Bell believe, is unorthodoxy and dissent.
After Are You Now or Have You Ever Been opens, Shapiro heads to Yale University to begin studying for a master’s in directing (she has a BA in theater from Columbia College, where she and Bell first met as students). But the company she cofounded will continue, she says, with two other plays planned for this season. Like this one, she says, they’ll be big-cast productions with a political edge: “We have a mission. It’s simple. We’re sick of going to theater that has nothing to do with what’s going on today.”
