“We’re caught up in a whirl-wind,” says one of the left-wing artists who has been subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 about possible “subversive” activities in radio, TV, and theater. Finks, a drama by Joe Gilford now in a West Coast premiere at Rogue Machine, takes the audience right into the eye of the whirlwind which devastated so much of this country’s cultural landscape in the fifties. The HUAC, led by the Hon. Francis Walter (Matt Gottleb), had made an infamous name for itself by launching a right-wing attack on Hollywood which resulted in jail terms for ten screenwriters and directors. Their crime? Refusing to name their progressive friends and colleagues before the Committee. Deemed “un-friendly” witnesses, they were found in contempt of Congress and locked up for a year or two. They and hundreds of other like-minded film workers were also blacklisted by the studios. In Finks, the same inquisitional game-plan targets the leaders of Actors Faction, Natalie Meltzer (Vanessa Claire Stewart) and Mickey Dobbs (French Stewart). Actors Faction was singled out because of its political activities, such as standing up for civil rights, socialized medicine, Russian war relief. Natalie, an actress, was militantly left-wing—yes, maybe even communist—but her husband Mickey was much less of a political animal. A stand-up comic and a song-and-dance man (captivating performance by French Stewart), he was just vaguely on the left, a man who was more concerned about getting laughs than he was about the impact of the class struggle. He is severely tested though when, on the verge of getting his own TV show, he is subpoenaed by the HUAC. His moral dilemma is a powerful one: if he refuses to name names, he will be dumped by the gutless network and blacklisted. If he chooses to become an “unfriendly” witness—a fink or stool-pigeon, really—he will be able to tell himself (and his son, one day) that he did the right thing, the honorable thing. Both the playwright and director of Finks are the children of blacklisted parents. They have done their forebears proud by mounting a vibrant production of the play, one that brings the contentious fifties to life in a hard-driving, impressionistic way. With pianist Richard Levinson underscoring the action, the play moves swiftly, with one short scene following another in cinematic fashion: one minute we’re in a NY nightclub, with Mickey Dobbs cracking wise before an unseen audience, the next we’re in the HUAC chambers where such “friendly” witnesses as Elia Kazan (Daniel Dorr), Budd Schulberg, and Martin Berkeley (Thomas Fiscella), are spilling their guts to Rep. Walter. There are also scenes at Action Faction meetings, confrontations between Mickey and his network lawyer Victor Lynch (Dorr), who tries to browbeat him into following in Kazan and Schulberg’s footsteps. One of the most intense, even heart-breaking scenes takes place between Mickey and his best friend, Bobby Gerard (Adam Lebowitz-Lockard). Gerard (think Jerome Robbins) is a dancer/choreographer) who shocks Mickey when he confesses that he is about to betray him before the committee. Finks may be a historical play but the history it deals with has come full circle on us. We are living in a similarly highly-charged political environment, one in which right-wing powers have mounted an attack on democratic values and beliefs. That makes the piece even more relevant than when it was first produced back East in 2008.
