Review: CONSCIENCE at Westport Community Theatre

Kudos to the Westport Community Theatre for presenting the Connecticut premiere of Joe DiPietro’s riveting play Conscience. Although we all love crowd-pleasers, producing a show that makes you think, teaches you about something unfamiliar, and enlightens you about something you think you already knew is one of the many reasons to see as many plays as possible. The play Conscience reflects politics at its best and worst, both then and today.

The four-character play is about Senator Margaret Chase Smith (played by Ann Kinner) and her battle against Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tom Petrone) during the Red Scare of the 1950s. The other characters are Chase’s advisor William Lewis, Jr. (David Victor) and Jean Kerr (Rachel Dalton), who worked for McCarthy and later married him. The title of the play is from Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience" speech to the Senate in 1950 which criticized McCarthy’s tactics to ferret out every person in the U.S. government who he thought was a Communist.  Smith was the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first to seek the Republican Party’s presidential election in 1964. In this critic’s opinion, Conscience is much better than Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which took place during the Salem Witch Trials, but was really about McCarthyism.

While all the characters were well cast, Tom Petrone was the most memorable as the bullying McCarthy. Every expression on his face, including his eyes, every movement of his body, and his posture were totally credible. That said, Ann Kinner conveyed Smith’s unwavering principles, integrity, personal pain and struggles, and dedication to her constituents with great dignity. David Victor played William Lewis, Jr. sympathetically as Smith’s trustworthy and admiring advisor who had to harbor his homosexuality. Rachel Dalton was dynamic as Jean Kerr, who blindly idolized McCarthy and later married him. Alexander Kulscar’s skills as a director brought out every facet of DiPietro’s play and every actor’s performance.

Everyone should see Conscience. History doesn’t always repeat itself. Sometimes it mutates. I wish that every high school would present this play, even in a video, so that today’s students will be more aware of the history that took place during their grandparents’ time. The Red Scare caused a lot of creative people to move overseas because they supported Leftism as a reaction to the Fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain during the 1930s and 1940s. Some well-known people, such as screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, were jailed for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during McCarthy’s maniacal investigation.

DePietro’s play has some great lines, some of which are his own, and some are from recorded history, such as Smith’s powerful speech to the Senate. She said, "I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear." She called McCarthy’s rants “a geyser of nonsense.” (For the record, both McCarthy and Smith were Conservative Republicans.) She tells McCarthy, “You’re the worst kind of politician. Governing doesn’t interest you. You only like the sport of it all, the throne you get to sit on. You say the stupidest things imaginable and then you revel in the chaos.”  She describes him as having “the ability to hate…[but] project it as a virtue.” Bill Lewis observes “They hate him but they’re all afraid of him.” Jean Kerr’s defense of McCarthy’s accusations includes “It’s not dirty if it’s true.”

The parallels between McCarthy and his grip on the Republican Party and a certain controversial politician today are uncanny. During a scene in which a fuming, bellowing McCarthy has a tirade and bangs his fist on a table, I kept thinking that there would catsup flying everywhere. Does this sound familiar or what?

Here's a sad fact about Conscience. It premiered in Joseph DiPietro’s native New Jersey on March 1, 2020. Less than a fortnight later, the show closed when almost everything shut down because of the pandemic. The play remained under most theater artistic directors’ radar. Hopefully, it will command their attention if only because DiPietro won two Tony Awards for Memphis (Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score) and the Drama Desk Award for Nice Work if You Can Get It (Outstanding Book of a Musical).