Called "the theater conscience of our times," Eric Bentley has been both a leading critic and a playwright. Rallying Cries presents three of his best known works: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been, successfully staged around the world and on television; The Recantation of Galileo Galilei; and the controversial From the Memoirs of Pontius Pilate, a work initially rejected as insufficiently Christian by its commissioning theater but then successfully produced in New York at the Actors Studio and American Jewish Theater.

Eric Bentley (born September 14, 1916) is a British-born American critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. In 1998, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame and is a member of the New York Theater Hall of Fame in recognition of his many years of cabaret performances. Born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, Bentley attended Oxford University, receiving his degree in 1938, and subsequently attended Yale University (B.Litt, 1939 and PhD., 1941), where he received the John Addison Porter Prize. Beginning in 1953, Bentley taught at Columbia University and simultaneously was a theatre critic for The New Republic.