‘McCarthy’ Director Blends Politics, History to Recreate Chill of an Era of Demagoguery

For Frank Condon, 1988 feels an awful lot like 1953.

“A few years ago, I started getting interested in Joe McCarthy; his visage kept coming up in the Reagan years,” said the director, 44, whose staging of Jeff Goldsmith’s docudrama “McCarthy” is in its 5th month at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles. “The way Reagan wrapped himself in the American flag, that whole rise of the fundamentalist right--it made me think about McCarthy a lot.”

Through the play, Condon (who serves as associate artistic director of the Odyssey) hoped to dramatize the rise and fall of a demagogue. “Also, what struck me was how popular this man was. It’s easy to look at him like an ogre: hated, feared. But he was quite popular--until he took his fall. He stood for the common man, was a Populist, attacked the ‘East Coast liberals.’ He made the statement that McCarthyism was Americanism with its sleeves rolled up. And he presented that persona, cultivated it.”

McCarthy was more than an interesting psychological study for the director. A former history teacher with a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s in theater literature and directing, he is drawn to the sociopolitical themes of the period. “This play is not a history lesson--or even a panorama of the time,” he said with emphasis. “But what I did want to do was give the audience a feeling of what it was like in the ‘50s--with the use of slides and newsreels.

“I agree with the adage that if you don’t understand history and have no connection with it, it’s liable to repeat itself. The problem is that Americans don’t have a very strong sense of our history. After all, it’s only 200 years old. And every day, we’re bombarded with so much new information that we tend to lose track of these subjects.

“But it’s important to know that the ‘50s weren’t just ‘Happy Days.’ A lot of people were destroyed.”

The director also thinks it’s important not to underestimate the magnitude of the witch hunts, or to dismiss McCarthy as a single aberration.

“Joe McCarthy didn’t invent redbaiting,” Condon said. “It had been around a long time before he came along. He just seized the moment--and he was audacious with it. He captured the public’s imagination. We’ve seen those themes all over again in the recent election--that whole ‘card-carrying liberal’ situation, where the word liberal was a red flag. It makes me a little crazy, because the liberal tradition is honorable; it deals with freedom and what our country really stands for.”

It was in a similar activist spirit that Condon co-directed Elizabeth Swados’ and Garry Trudeau’s brash political spoof, “Rap Master Ronnie” (in 1984, at the Odyssey and the Backlot, in West Hollywood) followed by numerous regional stagings. Even before “Rap Master,” Condon had a yen for politically conscious theater. His credits include the award-winning “Chicago Conspiracy Trial” (on the prosecution of Daniel and Philip Berrigan), “Year One of the Empire” (on Teddy Roosevelt) and “Oppenheimer” (about the controversial nuclear scientist).

Condon, who notes good-naturedly that he seems to be working his way chronologically from Roosevelt to Reagan, already has the subject in mind for his next project: Oliver North. “It’s still in the formative stage,” he said. “But that particular character fascinates me, because of his image--and also because he could become our next powerful demagogue. At this moment, he’s running for Jesus Christ through Jerry Falwell. But all of these phenomenons--Roosevelt, Reagan, Abbie Hoffman--affect us. They become our cultural icons.”

Condon’s habit of mixing politics and theater started at UC Santa Barbara, where the history department was reeling from educational cuts by then-Gov. Reagan. As dramaturge of a self-styled “guerrilla theater,” he began drawing on influences from the Bread and Puppet Theatre and San Francisco Mime Troupe. He went on to launch Luis Valdez’s El Teatro Campesino and to direct at South Coast Repertory, the Denver Center and the Mark Taper Forum, where he ran the Improvisational Theatre Project from 1977 to 1982.

These days, Condon divides his time between directing and teaching, and he worries only a little that his political theater projects will get him into trouble.

“It’s dangerous material to do,” he agreed. “But the reason I do this kind of theater is not to preach to the already converted. I don’t want to tell people what to think. I want them to come and make their own judgments--especially young people, who weren’t around in the McCarthy era and don’t know who he is.

“People don’t want to come to the theater to be hit over the head and preached to; that kind of art is insulting to the intelligence of our audience. But any art form isn’t going to be interesting unless it has a certain point of view.”