Are You Now or Have You Ever BeenAn American Docudrama

At New York City Center, **Are You Now or Have You Ever Been** stages a documentary-style account of Cold War loyalty hearings and the machinery of suspicion that followed. Built from testimony and public record, it tracks how questions of belief and association were turned into tools of surveillance and punishment, with artists and ordinary citizens caught in the frame. In New York, where the performing arts were both targeted and politicized in that era, the play reads as civic history, not nostalgia. Its restraint is the point; the facts do most of the arguing.