Eric Bentley is credited as Are You Now's playwright, but most of the script isn't his invention. The play is composed of excerpts from the verbatim transcripts of HUAC hearings, which Bentley strategically arranged for maximum dramatic effect.

"It's a very voyeuristic feeling for the audience, to be having a peek at what actually happened," said Ashmanskas. "These are the actual words these men and women said, and it's woven into a dramatic arc and storyline very intricately."

These words manifest in different ways. Sally Murphy, as playwright Lillian Hellman, reads her letter denouncing the committee for pitting people against each other. David Krumholtz gives a famous speech by musical theatre writer Abe Burrows, who named names and was one of the few witnesses to have a successful post-HUAC career. And an extended sequence puts Andrew McCarthy in the hot seat as actor Larry Parks, who initially refused to betray others. As time creeps on and the interrogation intensifies, he caves — and we're made to feel that mounting pressure just as much as he does.

"I'm old enough that I know people who went through this and have spoken to people who lived through that," said Jay O. Sanders, who plays Lionel Stander. Stander was notoriously uncooperative at his hearing and got blacklisted more than once, and Sanders jumped at the opportunity to share Stander's integrity with a new generation.

"Certainly, when I heard it was being done, I thought, 'This is a project I definitely want to be part of. I want to tell this story. I want to keep it alive,'" Sanders recalled. "I have an awareness from another time, but I've also [...] come to see it from a present perspective. It doesn't get any prettier no matter how you look at it. It was an ugly group of men at a table saying, 'You'd better conform or you're out.'

"I'm not proud to be telling this story in terms of what happened because I'm ashamed of this country and what it went through," Sanders continued, "but I'm proud of the people who held their heads high and made their way through."

Every drama has its comic relief, even in real life. Believe it or not, you'll chuckle during Are You Now at remarks intentionally and unintentionally funny, like Abe Burrows' snark about others' interior design choices or his own social schedule. Jerome Robbins insists on testifying with the lights off. Martin Berkeley states that Hollywood communists organized at his house "by a strange coincidence."

"Some [witnesses] were more concerned with appealing to the committee than they were with preserving their own dignity, and others vice versa. So there's a lot of tension, and it can break out into amusing situations sometimes," said Frederick Weller, who plays multiple characters including Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller.

Even the stoic, ruthless committee prompts some laughs, like when one member gravely asks Larry Parks whether communist meetings had refreshments. The inclusion of moments like this in Are You Now makes the committeemen into the butt of Bentley's joke — and of karma's.

Michael McKean, who plays an amalgamation of HUAC chairmen, gave an example: "The chairman of the committee that went after the Hollywood Ten three or four years before this, he wound up going to jail himself. Isn't that delightful? Every now and then the Greek tragedy gets funny. And [Hollywood Ten member] Ring Lardner ran into him in prison and describes it."

"The way it's staged, you feel like you are part of the gallery during these testimonies. I mean, people are addressing the audience like they are participants in the hearings, so it really feels very intimate," said Steven Boyer, who plays multiple witnesses including director/choreographer Jerome Robbins.

This is true — when a witness gestures to the journalists, photographers, or onlookers in the room at their hearing, those lines are delivered toward the audience. Like the people present back then, you'll react to watching the testimonies unfold in real time: "There might be people who say, literally, 'Oh, I've always liked him, and look at what he did. Look how he bailed on his friends.' This is the way it was," said McKean.

Understudy Bill Timoney compared Are You Now to You Are There, a 1947–57 TV and radio show in which actors recreated historical events and journalists interviewed them in character, as though we were watching these events unfold on the news today.

"This does have that feeling of a You Are There episode. You were there at the HUAC hearings of '47, '51, '53, where some very famous people had their careers and their lives destroyed," Timoney said.

Hear Timoney out. The HUAC committees, being able to end reputations and careers in a snap, "had the power of life and death" over those testifying, he argued. "They were called witnesses, but they were not. They were defendants. They were defending their lives and their careers.

"In 1974, the movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre came out. The tagline on the poster was, 'Who will survive, and what will be left of them?'" Timoney continued. "Not quite as literal as a chainsaw massacre, but here, the people called to 'witness' at the committee hearings — who will survive, and what will be left of them?"

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