NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — The woman behind me was talking about her memories of McCarthyism, and I assumed she must be speaking of her childhood.
But as I eavesdropped before the show at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, I heard her mention that she was 94. She had never liked the red-baiting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, she said. She had been a fan, though, of his colleague and adversary Margaret Chase Smith.
“Conscience,” Joe DiPietro’s new comic drama, displays a similar allegiance in recounting the fraught events of seven decades ago. A timely boxing match of a history play, it stars a deliciously piquant Harriet Harris as Smith, the principled, moderate, junior senator from Maine who in 1950 publicly stood up to McCarthy when most of their fellow Republicans were too cowed.
In David Saint’s George Street Playhouse production, “Conscience” portrays Smith — the first woman elected to both houses of Congress and, at the time of the play, the only female senator — as a dry-witted hero with the rare courage to take on a lying bully who is sowing chaos, ruining reputations and threatening the very fabric of the nation.
Assorted parallels to contemporary politics are there for the drawing, should you be so inclined.
The fun of the play is partly in Smith’s withering contempt for the junior senator from Wisconsin — “the scoundrel Joe McCarthy,” she calls him. Also, given his incessant drinking: “an idiotic lush.”
“He’s like the worst boy you went to high school with,” she marvels to her indispensable aide, William Lewis Jr. (Mark Junek).
Smith and Lewis make a formidable, deeply sympathetic team. They are well matched by McCarthy — played by Lee Sellars as a sort of East-Coast-meets-Texas boor, without a whisper of Wisconsin to him — and his ruthlessly loyal young researcher, Jean Kerr (Cathryn Wake), who will become his wife.
But DiPietro (“Memphis”), whose new musical “Diana” is in previews on Broadway, and Saint, George Street’s artistic director, haven’t figured out how to use Smith’s extraordinary “Declaration of Conscience” speech, which calls out McCarthy without ever naming him. Its delivery on the Senate floor is the climax of Act I.
The address is fueled by righteous passion (“I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear,” Smith says), yet the abridged version here is a moment of witness, not drama. The tension and dread that are meant to rise do not.
With Smith’s challenge thrown down, though, McCarthy in the second act is hellbent on her destruction, threatening to expose not only her secrets (her congressman husband was chronically unfaithful and died of syphilis) but also Lewis’s (he is gay and closeted). Frightened though Smith is, she is even more outraged that so many others knuckle under to McCarthy’s blatant thuggery.
Smith went on to have a far longer career than McCarthy, and twice as long a life; for all the damage he wrought, he spent only a decade in the Senate and didn’t live to see 50. The play makes a point of the brevity of his terrorizing reign.
It is acutely alert, too, to the egregious sexism that Smith and other women endured just to do their jobs. The exposition, though, is occasionally clumsy, as when Kerr expresses surprise at running into Smith in a regular women’s restroom at the Senate.
“I just assumed you’d be in a senator’s washroom,” Kerr says, but would a whip-smart female staffer think that, really, when there wasn’t even a tiny one for female senators until the 1990s?
Still, when Kerr mentions that Smith is being floated as a possible vice-presidential nominee, the senator speaks the stubborn Catch-22 out loud. Even if she were interested, Smith says, “it would be, well, unladylike for me to say so.”
As programming for Women’s History Month, then, “Conscience” makes a lot of sense.
Oddly, however, the deliberate male-female balance we see onstage is absent from the show’s creative team. Playwright, director, designers — all men. It’s as if the play’s lesson on gender equality weren’t applicable to the workplace that is professional theater.
Yet it is. And when the creative team you’re assembling scores worse on female membership than the U.S. Senate in 1950, you might want to check your conscience.
Conscience
Through March 29 at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, New Brunswick, N.J.; 732-246-7717, georgestreetplayhouse.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
