The trauma of being unfairly sacked from your job and blacklisted for decades can haunt a person for the rest of their life. Jeffrey Sweet’s The Value of Names, first performed in the early 1980s, explores the consequences of this.
In a tight, often witty script, the central character, Benny Silverman, a victim of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the 1950s, finds himself thirty years later still bothered by those events that wrecked his acting career for two decades.
The play opens on the porch of his comfortable home by the Pacific coast where he is painting the landscape.
He is being visited by his daughter Norma, who has landed an acting role in a show taking place nearby. She asks him if he knows any hotels where she can stay while she performs. Benny suggests she stays with him, but, suspecting that might be distracting, she explains to the audience as she looks out to the sea and then to her dad, “on the whole, I have less trouble with the Pacific than I do with my dad.”
We soon see what she means when Benny grumbles about the play and then about her revelation that she has taken her mum’s family name to escape being constantly referred to in reviews as the daughter of Benny Silverman.
The question of his name crops up further when the director of the play she is in falls ill and is replaced by Leo Greshen, the former friend whom he acted alongside in the New Labor Players that gave him his first acting job. This was the person who named him at a 1950s HUAC meeting that resulted in him being blacklisted from acting work.
However, Leo seems to think all that is in the past. In a later scene, he strolls onto Benny’s porch to have a chat and maybe a laugh about old times. Pointing out he is getting on okay with another victim of his HUAC appearance after laughing at one of his jokes at a fundraiser, he admits, “he didn’t forgive me. I think he just put it aside.”
Benny is polite, even offering Leo a beer, but isn’t ready to put it aside. He is also not swayed by Leo pointing out that Stalin turned Trotsky into a non-person or that the American left victims were just as bad kicking people out of their groups, implying they were all as bad as each other. Benny regards that as a cheap way of avoiding responsibility arguing, “but you did it. You helped the bad guys be bad guys”.
Leo leaves asking Norma to let him know if she will take the acting part. Alone with her father, she shakes her head admitting that Leo “did a shitty thing”.
Very movingly, Benny replies, “I was an actor. You can’t do that by yourself. If someone cuts you off from that, you can’t grow or develop… You are an exile from yourself. That was what he did when he said my name.”
Guessing his daughter won’t make a stand against Leo and dump the play, he rather harshly adds, “you two will get on. He stole my name. You threw it away.”
This thoughtful play performed by three very strong actors holds the audience’s attention with its believable characters and stimulating dialogue even though the dramatic tension is low and there is no resolution. However, the final words of the performance are powerful, particularly since the world again seems to be slipping into versions of McCarthyism.