Disgrace Under Pressure

By T.E. Kalem

ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN Arranged by ERIC BENTLEY

This documentary collage, currently on view at Washington, D.C.'s Ford's Theater, is at least as old as the Salem witch hunts. Author-Teacher-Critic Eric Bentley has arranged some of the testimony elicited from suspected Communists and fellow travelers by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late '40s and early '50s. The witnesses are exclusively from the Hollywood and Broadway communities and include, among others, such figures as Larry Parks, Jose Ferrer, Abe Burrows, Elia Kazan, Jerome Robbins, Lillian Hellman, Lionel Slander, Arthur Miller and Paul Robeson. (Bentley seems no less inclined than HUAC to sprinkle Stardust in order to germinate publicity.)

Bentley claims that his show is "theater of fact." True, he has invented not a spoken line of it, but facts are mute. They are animated by climates of opinion, and that social context is missing. Bentley simply relies on popular present attitudes to validate lofty moral judgments on the past. At the time the hearings were held, wartime amity with the Soviet Union had been crushed by the descent of the Iron Curtain, and there was a not unnatural suspicion, supported by proof which exists to this very moment, that the Russians were out to Communize the world.

Insofar as this cobwebby evening possesses any dramatic impact, it is in the display of grace, or disgrace, under pressure. Some witnesses are wily, some cringe, some babble to save themselves in a variety of plea bargaining, some show valor. It is honorable that Arthur Miller will incriminate no one but him self and that Lillian Hellman's credo is, "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." But that does not automatically brand the men who confessed and "named names" as mor al lepers. When Stalin has been your god, how do you redeem your guilt?

The cast is fine. David Spielberg as Actor Parks poignantly tries to cling to a shard of dignity, and Allan Miller as Abe Burrows pulls more legs than the committee has. The real inquisitor is Bentley, who deals out a blame game that is dramatically deficient and devoid of charity.

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