Review: ‘Conscience’ Carries the Weight of Its Conviction at ICT

History has a way of remembering its loudest voices while allowing quieter acts of courage to go largely unnoticed. Joe DiPietro’s Conscience, now receiving its Los Angeles premiere at International City Theatre in Long Beach through September 13th, reverses that tendency by revisiting the remarkable story of U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine Republican who publicly challenged Joseph McCarthy at a time when doing so carried considerable political and personal risk.

Directed by caryn desai [sic], who also serves as ICT’s artistic director and producer, the four-character drama reaches back more than three-quarters of a century to an era when fear could be politically weaponized, accusations required little to no evidence, and silence often proved the safest form of complicity. What gives the play its searing relevance is how little translation some of those ideas require today.

Smith (Sharon Gardner) entered Congress after the death of her husband, Clyde Smith, winning the special election to succeed him in the House before eventually being elected to the Senate in 1948. In DiPietro’s telling, the freshman senator encounters fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy (Jon Root) — characterized as the Senate’s least popular member — while seeking a place on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. McCarthy grants her the position almost casually, and Smith initially sees the possibility of a political alliance. Both are Republicans and staunchly anti-Communist, but Smith is also fundamentally opposed to corruption, and it does not take long for her to recognize that McCarthy’s ambitions, steadfastly supported by his amoral secretary Jean Kerr (Hollis Dohr), are governed less by principle than by whatever might elevate Joseph McCarthy.

That opportunity arrives during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, where McCarthy insidiously frames the moment as “Communistic Atheism versus Christianity” and announces that he possesses a list of 205 Communists supposedly working within the State Department. The corroboration seems to elude his briefcase, but the accusation itself is enough to generate headlines and political momentum, becoming the terrifying engine of Conscience, where a man discovers that an unsupported assertion can acquire power simply by being repeated often and with enough bluster.

The stakes turn personal when McCarthy targets Dorothy Kenyon, a respected lawyer and former judge who was a friend of Smith’s, accusing her of associations with Communist-front organizations. Assisted by longtime adviser William Lewis, Jr. (Dylan C. Wittrock), Smith moves steadily toward the act of defiance for which she would become best known: her June 1st, 1950 “Declaration of Conscience,” a repudiation of fear, smear tactics and character assassination that cleverly never needed to mention McCarthy by name.

Gardner gives the production its center of gravity, going beyond mere impersonation to fully inhabit Smith as a dramatic figure, projecting the senator’s glamour, composure and formidable resolve while also remaining attuned to the vulnerability beneath her public persona. Speaking in a stately, continental accent, Gardner conveys someone who understands the possible cost of resistance but refuses to accept victimhood as the price of surviving in politics.

There is an impressive certitude to the performance, with Smith rarely needing to become the loudest person in the room because Gardner makes clear that conviction and volume are not the same thing. Against a political bully accustomed to watching others retreat, that restraint becomes its own form of force. It is also difficult to ignore the significance of who is doing the resisting when one considers that Smith was the only woman in the U.S. Senate in 1950, occupying a space overwhelmingly dominated by men. Gardner makes her isolated stand against McCarthy palpable and worthy of the spotlight it receives here.

Root has the flashier assignment and embraces it, creating a McCarthy who is chauvinistic, belligerent and indiscriminate in his charges while finding something more chilling beneath the obvious menace. A high-pitched laugh, an almost laissez-faire looseness and, at times, an odd charm matter because demagogues rarely become influential through unpleasantness alone.

Root portrays a man intoxicated by attention above all else. Whether embellishing his military record, affecting the image of a decorated veteran or brandishing a dubious list, this McCarthy, despite the soulless vacancy underlying his “convictions,” discovers that calumny works and that politics, in his opinion, functions best when people can be given an enemy to fear.

Wittrock provides an effective counterweight as Lewis, introduced as former chief counsel of the Naval Affairs Committee and one of Smith’s closest political confidants. His support has the warmth of genuine friendship, but Wittrock also gives Lewis a practical streak that occasionally puts caution at odds with Smith’s instinct to “poke the bear.”

That relationship becomes more affecting when the machinery of intimidation reaches Lewis himself. The threat of exposing his attraction to men demonstrates how easily suspicion could expand beyond Communism into a broader system of personal coercion. Through Wittrock, the audience understands that McCarthyism’s damage was not confined to Senate chambers or newspaper headlines.

Initially, Dohr’s Jean Kerr is harder to read, entering almost unobtrusively, frequently objectified by McCarthy and even expressing admiration for Smith. For a time, there is reason to wonder whether she might become another dissenter, but Dohr instead traces the evolution of someone whose loyalty gradually becomes its own moral failure. Kerr can acknowledge McCarthy’s defects and then dismiss them with the equivalent of “nobody’s perfect,” a rationalization that becomes increasingly disturbing as his conduct worsens. Dohr makes that trajectory particularly effective, capturing the unsettling psychology of unquestioning allegiance.

desai gives all four performers sufficient room for the characters’ perspectives and arcs to register, favoring clarity over theatrical ornamentation. That restraint extends to the physical production, where scenic designers Brittany Bodley and Mason Irwin opt for an appropriately spare environment built largely around two desks and a gray platform, allowing the significance of the period itself to remain foregrounded.

Donny Jackson’s lighting gives the performers a lush illumination, whether highlighting an ascendant demagogue or the senator preparing to oppose him, while Hunter Moody’s sound helps punctuate the numerous transitions. Resident costume designer Kim DeShazo places the quartet comfortably within the historical setting without making period detail a distraction.

A rather evocative touch awaits audiences outside the drama itself in ICT’s lobby, where Smith’s actual 3-by-5 notecards comprising the “Declaration of Conscience” are displayed for attendees, lending an unexpectedly tangible quality to the speech.

Conscience is not without limitations. At times, DiPietro’s determination to convey the historical record causes the play to labor under it, with dialogue becoming dense and certain passages feeling closer to an illustrated recollection of events than dramatically propulsive theater. Yet the same fidelity that occasionally weighs the production down also gives it credibility, as DiPietro hardly needs to exaggerate the epoch to make his argument when the parallels are already deeply disturbing.

We now live in an attention economy capable of rewarding outrage within seconds, where facts can be recast as lies, lies propped up as truth, and public figures emboldened less by being right than by harnessing the wicked power of publicity, good or bad. Conscience lays bare the mechanism by which unsavory actors rise. McCarthy, even all these years ago, understood the value of spectacle long before social media could quantify it, while Smith understood something far more consequential — that silence itself can become a form of participation. That is ultimately why her story deserves to be celebrated.

DiPietro’s words linger well after the final bows, prompting discussion and reminding us that, as long as we live in a government by the people, and whether we’re an elected official or not, we have an equal part in standing up to values antithetical to democracy. And, as difficult as it might be, doing so ultimately requires a willingness to follow our conscience even when fear would have us do otherwise.

Cover image caption: Left to right are Sharon Gardner and Jon Root in Conscience at International City Theatre in Long Beach, CA. Photo by Jordan Gohara.

Joe DiPietro’s Conscience plays at International City Theatre’s Beverly O’Neill Theater in Long Beach through Sunday, September 13th. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit ictlongbeach.org.