Margaret Chase Smith arrived in Congress in 1940, when women in Washington, D.C., were still generally expected to type the speeches rather than make them.
Elected to the Senate eight years later, the Maine Republican became the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress — and, in 1950, was the only woman among 96 senators.
That same year, Rep. Joseph McCarthy began transforming suspicion into political currency amid the “Red Scare.” On June 1, Smith answered him with her “Declaration of Conscience,” condemning a politics built upon “fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.”
Six Republican senators eventually joined her, but Smith led the charge, and paid for it with lost committee assignments, political isolation and McCarthy’s attempts to remove her from office.
Joe DiPietro’s “Conscience,” which is about Smith and is having its Los Angeles premiere at International City Theatre, made me angry in all the right ways. Smith had lived through Hitler’s rise and was confronting, barely five years after World War II, another demagogue using the familiar language of scapegoats, invented enemies and national purity.
That DiPietro’s play now resembles this morning’s newspaper is not merely relevant. It is also heartbreaking.
Sharon Gardner gives Smith intelligence, dry wit and tempered steel. She never turns her into a plaster saint; this is an ambitious politician who knows exactly what her conscience may cost. Jon Root’s McCarthy is blustering, funny, charming and revolting, often within a single breath. That charisma matters: monsters are rarely handed power because they are dull.
Dylan Wittrock brings warmth and vulnerability to William Lewis Jr., while Hollis Dohr gives Jean Kerr an intelligence and ambition independent of the man beside her.
Under caryn desai’s admirably restrained direction, the production trusts its audience to recognize the parallels without illuminating them in flashing red neon. “Conscience” asks not simply how Smith found the courage to speak, but why so many people around her found silence more convenient.
DiPietro builds his drama from names, dates and the public record.
‘Conscience’
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 13.
Where: International City Theatre in the Beverly O’Neill Theater, 330 E. Seaside Way.
Cost: Thursdays-Saturdays, $56; Sundays, $59. Advance discounts are available for students, seniors and others.
Information: 562-436-4610 or ictlongbeach.org/conscience.
‘The Swan’
After the grim recognizability of “Conscience,” a swan crashing through a Nebraska window may not seem quite so preposterous. Reality has already demonstrated a rather alarming talent for the absurd.
The Greeks, naturally, got to the swan first.
In the myth of Leda, Zeus assumes the form of the bird and crashes divine power, desire and violation into a mortal woman’s life. Elizabeth Egloff, who wrote “The Swan” while studying at Yale University in the late 1980s, relocates that collision to Nebraska, where a lonely nurse named Dora is having an unsatisfying affair with a married milkman when a swan comes through her window and becomes a man.
At The Garage Theatre, director Rory Cowan understands that the play’s peculiar events must be grounded in recognizable emotion. His lovely direction never tries to solve the play’s surrealism. Instead, he locates its magic in loneliness, desire and the desperate need to be chosen.
Whitney Ellis gives Dora a bruised, hungry heart that fills the room. Matthew Anderson’s comically broad performance still makes Kevin the milkman more than an easy joke, discovering tenderness inside a man whose emotional equipment is hardly factory-new. Nick Napoli commits fearlessly to Bill’s transformation from hostile animal to awkward, yearning man, using his entire body to make the impossible surprisingly credible.
Together, the three actors create a strange but genuinely moving love triangle.
The play repeats itself, circles its ideas and moves in fits and starts — because Dora’s world is doing precisely that. And if that sounds classically “absurdist,” it might be, but don’t expect it to become Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” This world seems more of a love child of playwright Eugène Ionesco and author Franz Kafka, rather than the philosophical musings of Beckett.
Like Beckett, however, let’s refuse to put this wondrous little gem in any box and just let it breath. And breath it does, thanks in large part to Cowan’s focus on the emotional context.
The evocative sound design and beautiful set complete that familiar Garage Theatre miracle: a tiny storefront that always seems considerably larger on the inside. The production does not tell us exactly what its swan means. It does something better: it makes us feel why Dora needed him to come through the window.
Both “Conscience” and “The Swan” begin with something that does not behave as polite society expects. Smith refuses to remain an obedient woman and party member; Bill refuses, rather spectacularly, to remain a bird. One disrupts a political order and the other a domestic one.
But both plays understand that the world frequently calls something dangerous when it is actually frightened of having its comfortable assumptions disturbed.
‘The Swan’
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays from Sept. 10 to 26.
Where: The Garage Theatre, 251 E. Seventh St.
Cost: General admission, $28; students, seniors, teachers and military members, $23.
Information: 562-283-3732 or thegaragetheatre.org/onstagenow.