Congratulations to Columbia College Chicago Theatre alum Anna D. Shapiro ’90, HDR ’15, whose new Off-Broadway staging of Eric Bentley‘s documentary theatre piece Are You Now or Have You Ever Been at New York City Center has received rave reviews.
Shapiro – who won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2008 for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit August: Osage County and received an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Columbia College in 2015, when she spoke at the college’s commencement ceremony for graduating Theatre majors – is an ensemble member and former artistic director of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. She previously directed Bentley’s play in 1990 for Chicago’s Big Game Theatre, which she cofounded shortly after graduating from Columbia. That production featured her fellow Columbia College Theatre student Scott Adsit, who is also featured in the current production of the play at New York City Center. Other cast members include Michael McKean, Andrew McCarthy, Molly Ringwald, David Krumholtz, Steven Pasquale, Harry Lennix, Bob Odenkirk, Norbert Leo Butz, and Shapiro’s fellow Steppenwolf member Sally Murphy. The show runs through Sept. 11.
“Shapiro’s [production] is theater to make the blood boil, and it means to be, as audience members watch historical figures living through a past whose echoes we can recognize in our present,” said New York Times theatre critic Laura Collins-Hughes in her “Critic’s Pick” published June 16, 2026. “It is a slow burn of a show, worthy of your attention.” And New York Stage Review’s Frank Scheck wrote: “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been remains a powerful distillation of an historical record of a shameful time in American history. The piece is beautifully served in this powerful staging by Anna D. Shapiro.”
First produced in 1972 by the Yale Repertory Theatre at Yale University, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been is based on transcripts of hearings held by the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the late 1940s and early ’50s to investigate alleged “Communist influences” in the arts. It was the era of the Cold War and Korea, when politicians such as Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) sought to make national reputations for themselves as anti-communist inquisitors. Artists in the film, TV, and theatre industries – including such prominent figures as playwrights Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, directors Elia Kazan and Jerome Robbins, and actors Jose Ferrer, Zero Mostel, Lionel Stander, Larry Parks, and Paul Robeson – 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 producers set up a blacklist to deflect governmental harassment and public disapproval.
In an interview with the Forward, an independent Jewish publication, Shapiro said: “I think that everybody will enter this play from a different perspective, because it’s in conversation with things that we’re dealing with as a country right now. For instance, my producer, Jeffrey Richards, who is of a certain generation, for him, it’s just deeply about freedom of expression. He has spent his whole life making art, championing artists, and the idea that he feels like we’re moving towards, which we clearly are, is a more fascist behavior around freedom of expression. He wants to remind people how dangerous some of these moves from the current administration are. . . . I’m just a little bit younger than Jeffrey. . . . I did the play when I was . . . just finishing college. And it was very clear then, right? It was about good guys and bad guys, and it was very easy to demonize the people who named names and champion the people who were brave enough not to name names. And now, as I’m older, I realize there’s a lot more complexity when the entire system is coming after you in a way that makes you feel like your entire livelihood is threatened. . . . I think that . . . what interests me . . . is how difficult it becomes to be good in America, how difficult that is becoming, how terrifying and terrorizing the current administration is. . . .
“I direct plays really for one reason, and that is to make the audience’s world bigger. And that really only happens two ways, right? You go into a theater and you either see something familiar and you go, wow, there’s other people like me, or you go into the theater and you see something so different from your own experience and you think, my God, the world is so much bigger than I know. In this play, based on the way that you calibrate the performances, you can either make a very black and white statement, or you can make more nuanced and ambiguous statements. . . . And where we are right now . . . I think that we are not talking to one another well. I think we are looking at black and white and good and evil, and it’s way more complex than that. So I hope people come away going, wow, I really thought it was just going to be like the good guys who didn’t name names and the bad guys who named names.” To read Shapiro’s full interview with the Forward, click here.
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