By Martin B. Copenhaver

Tony winning playwright Joe DiPietro does a commendable job of dramatizing the true-life confrontation between Margaret Chase Smith and Joseph McCarthy while they were both serving in the United States Senate.

Conscience by Joe DiPetro. Directed by Lisa DiFranza. Staged by Portland Stage at 25A Forest Avenue, Portland, ME, through October 13.

Kate Udall as Margaret Chase Smith and Isabelle Van Fleet as Jean Kerr pondering the possibility of a female vice president in the Portland Stage production of Conscience. Photo: James A. Hadley

Conscience is a play about a smart and principled woman who holds high office and aspires to become the first woman president of the United States. It chronicles her high-stakes political combat with a demagogue who has seized power through hateful lies and intimidation, tactics he learned from his Svengali, Roy Cohn. He is clearly a buffoon, but until this point he has bamboozled a large segment of the American populace into following him in an almost cultish manner.

The year? 1950, of course.

Conscience is based on the true-life confrontation between Margaret Chase Smith and Joseph McCarthy while they were both serving in the United States Senate.

Smith was first elected to represent Maine in the House of Representatives, occupying a seat previously held by her late husband. Then, in 1948, she went on to the Senate, becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. Even early in her tenure as senator there was talk of Smith being tapped to serve as vice president under Eisenhower. (Smith eventually did run for president in 1964.)

McCarthy, representing Wisconsin in the Senate, became a powerful force in American politics by promulgating what came to be known as “The Red Scare.” In a speech he gave in 1950, McCarthy claimed that he had the names of 205 Communists who had infiltrated the State Department. He never shared the names and, eventually, the charges proved unfounded. Nevertheless, for a time, public officials were reluctant to oppose him for fear of being accused of being Communists themselves. Politicians, as well as others in public life, were in thrall to McCarthy throughout the early ’50s. His lies went unrefuted and his power was largely unchecked.

The differences between Smith and McCarthy were not over policy. Both were conservative Republicans and both were fervent anti-Communists. Rather, Smith eventually spoke out against McCarthy because of his tactics. She demanded proof to support the accusations he hurled so recklessly. In 1950 she gave a speech on the Senate floor she called, “A Declaration of Conscience.” She did not name McCarthy in that speech, but she decried the tactics of the movement he championed, saying, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny — fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear.” It was the first time that a prominent figure had spoken out publicly against the tactics utilized by McCarthy.

Smith’s speech did not immediately have its desired effect. Everyone in the chamber — including the garrulous McCarthy — greeted it with damning silence. In the longer view of history, however, it has become clear that the speech was an inflection point.

Tony winning playwright Joe DiPietro does a commendable job of dramatizing this conflict on stage. For the most part, he refrains from too plainly drawing the parallels between then and now. As Mark Twain famously observed, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” However, at times Conscience poses historical rhymes of the most obvious moon/June/spoon variety. Some of the comparisons are a bit too spot-on, such as when Smith nails McCarthy with the declaration, “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.” (Sound like anyone you know?)

The cast consists of four characters; together they are like two duelers and their seconds. In addition to the two primary combatants, Smith and McCarthy, there is Smith’s advisor, Bill Lewis, and McCarthy’s assistant, Jean Kerr (not to be confused with the playwright of that name).

The rock-ribbed Smith is the most fully developed figure. Kate Udall, as Smith, commands the stage. What is more, Udall makes it clear that Smith is no plaster saint. Her superb performance gives shade and nuance to the role. For all of her flinty resolve, Udall’s portrayal of Smith also evinces vulnerabilities and doubts.

Liam Craig is given a different kind of challenge in playing Joseph McCarthy. To be sure, at this distance from the story, now that McCarthy has been exposed and repudiated, he looks ridiculous. Craig captures McCarthy’s boorish buffoonery well. But this kind of dismissive retrospective portrait does not tell the whole story. For a time, including the Cold War era in which the play is set, McCarthy cast a spell on much of the nation. He was a kind of twisted genius who instinctively knew how to tap into the fears and anxieties of the zeitgeist. This is the side of McCarthy that Craig does not capture. The result is a portrayal that ends up being, on occasion, cartoonish.

Kate Udall as Margaret Chase Smith and Liam Craig as Joseph McCarthy in the Portland Stage production of Conscience. Photo: James A. Hadley

Isabelle Van Vleet, excellent as Jean Kerr — McCarthy’s assistant and, later, his wife — is given a related challenge in that she must take up the unenviable task of defending McCarthy. At first, she is deferential to Smith, espousing her admiration for the senator as a capable and ambitious woman. As Smith and McCarthy begin to clash, however, Kerr takes to defending the indefensible with a white-heated passion. Over the course of the play she also becomes increasingly petty and vituperative, powerful evidence of the corrosive effect McCarthy had on the people around him.

John Maddaloni does an admirable job with the character of Bill Lewis Jr., Smith’s policy advisor. The most tender moments in the play are between Smith and Lewis as the risks of revelation call for mutual vulnerability.

The set, designed by Germán Cárdenas Alaminos, and the way it is used, are intriguing. It is quite simple, consisting largely of plain wooden chairs and tables. The floor of the stage, however, is painted with a large white square. Its shape and size resemble those of a boxing ring. When the characters are inside the square, they are engaged in the action, most often as verbal combatants. When the actors are outside the square, they do not leave the stage. Rather, they sit and observe the action, as if they are, for the moment, part of the audience.

Upstage there is a screen that projects various black-and-white scenes from the era in which the play is set. Some are of historical significance — such as a senate hearing or the test of a nuclear weapon  — while others are as everyday as a family slide. The effect is a reminder that, for all the parallels we may see to our own time, we don’t live in the ’50s anymore. Nevertheless, the political challenges of that tumultuous period have managed to follow us into our own. As the French critic and novelist, Alphonse Karr, ruefully observed long ago, and as this production aims to remind us: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Martin B. Copenhaver, the author of nine books, lives in Cambridge and Woodstock, VT.