American Docudrama ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN to Premiere Off-Broadway This June
Tickets are now available for a new production of Eric Bentley’s 1972 play, ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, beginning a limited 15-week engagement at New York City Center Stage I (131 West 55th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues) on Tuesday, June 2, 2026.
This summer, in a strictly limited engagement, a rotating all-star cast comes together for a timely and important revival of Eric Bentley’s ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN. This electrifying docudrama drops you into the tense world of the 1940s House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings, where fame offered no protection and political pressure could end a career.
Using only the original transcripts, the play features the words of artists like Arthur Miller, Jerome Robbins, Paul Robeson, Elia Kazan, Lillian Hellman, Abe Burrows, and Lionel Stander as they faced impossible choices: defend their integrity, protect their careers, or betray their peers. And yet the probing, chilling questions posed by the committee are as powerful as the testimonies themselves, revealing a climate of intimidation and moral conflict that resonates far beyond its time.
Begins June 2nd at New York City Center Stage 1 for 15 weeks only.
The production will be directed by Tony Award-winning director Anna D. Shapiro (Eureka Day, The Minutes, August: Osage County, The Motherf**ker with the Hat) and feature a rotating cast of artists throughout its run. Casting to be announced soon.
“I first encountered ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN when I directed it at my small theater in Chicago during college,” said Shapiro. “It was such a great experience then – filled with intensity and terror – and I’m so ready to wrestle with it again, now, a time of more threat to our freedoms than I’ve experienced in my lifetime. With this incredible rotating company, it’s sure to be a thrilling – and scary – experience.”
The design team for this production includes Andrew Boyce (Scenic Designer), Johanna Pan (Costume Designer), Donald Holder (Lighting Designer), Milbo Music (Sound Designer), and Brittany Bland (Projections Designer).
Created by one of the most influential theater intellectuals of the 20th century, Eric Bentley, ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN embodies his career-long drive to challenge audiences with the ideas behind the drama. Honored with a 2006 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement, Bentley turned history into riveting theater. By presenting the words exactly as spoken, Bentley transformed archival material into a dramatic confrontation between artists and government power. Throughout his career, Bentley wrote extensively on drama and performance with influential works including the landmark 1946 book The Playwright as Thinker, which helped define modern theater criticism.
The production arrives amid renewed public interest in the blacklist era, following last fall’s New-York Historical Society exhibition examining the Hollywood blacklist and the cultural impact of the HUAC hearings. The exhibit highlighted many of the same figures featured in Bentley’s play and underscored how questions of artistic freedom, political expression, and public pressure continue to resonate today.
Among the other figures portrayed in ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN? are film actor Larry Parks; director Sam G. Wood; filmmakers and Hollywood Ten members Edward Dmytryk and Ring Lardner, Jr.; screen star Sterling Hayden; acclaimed stage and screen actor José Ferrer; screenwriter Martin Berkeley; Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter Robert Rossen; labor organizer Tony Kraber; film director Frank Tuttle; actor and radio performer Nicholas Bela; stage and screen actor Elliott Sullivan; and character actor Marc Lawrence. Drawn from across film, theatre, radio, and music, these artists represent a cross-section of mid-century American entertainment at the height of the Hollywood studio era.
Tickets for ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN are now on sale online and at the box office (131 W 55th Street (between 6th and 7th avenues). For more information and to sign up to receive updates on the production, visit www.areyounowplay.com and follow @areyounowplay.
ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN is produced by Jeffrey Richards, Rebecca Gold, and Ira Pittelman.