New comedy takes on witch trials, Arthur Miller
‘Becky Nurse of Salem’ gets world premiere at Berkeley Rep
With the airwaves and internet cluttered with cries of “witch hunt” from one highly placed individual in particular, it’s only natural that there might be some renewed interest in the actual witch trials of the late 1600s. Even so, the sheer amount of witch hunt-related drama emerging on Berkeley stages in particular is surprising — and, refreshingly, not in the form of revivals of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.” This summer Those Women Productions premiered Carol S. Lashof’s “Witch Hunt,” and right now Shotgun Players is reviving Caryl Churchill’s “Vinegar Tom.” Meanwhile at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, one of the Bay Area’s favorite playwrights, Sarah Ruhl, explores the Salem witch trials from a modern perspective in a new world premiere comedy. “Becky Nurse of Salem” follows a modern-day descendant and namesake of Rebecca Nurse, one of the women convicted of witchcraft and hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Modern-day Becky is a struggling single mom who works as a tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft but keeps getting in trouble for speaking her mind and not sticking to the script. This is Ruhl’s sixth play at Berkeley Rep, after “Eurydice,” “Dear Elizabeth,” “Three Sisters,” “In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play)” and “For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday.” But it’s her first production there with a new director — Anne Kauffman instead of longtime collaborator Les Waters — and even a new artistic director, as Johanna Pfaelzer took over from Tony Taccone starting this season. “In the Next Room,” which premiered at Berkeley Rep in 2009, went on to become Ruhl’s Broadway debut later that year. “Becky” is in some ways a response to “The Crucible,” which the fictional Becky criticizes sharply in the play itself. “I’d seen a production of ‘The Crucible,’ and I felt very aware that the plot really hinges on Abigail Williams having a lust for John Proctor, and when the lust isn’t reciprocated turning on the women in the town and creating this hysterical revenge plot,” Ruhl recalls. “I thought that seems like a peculiar fantasy to have about this historical moment. And then I did some research and found out that in fact Abigail was 11, John Proctor was 60, and they never met.” “Even more interestingly,” she adds, “Arthur Miller was wanting to have sex with Marilyn Monroe when he wrote ‘The Crucible,’ and he was married, so all that libidinal energy went into this plot of the denied lust between Abigail and John.” On a more basic level, it seemed bizarre to center a story about the persecution and slaughter of women around a man at all. “Arthur Miller sees this historical fact that many, many women and a couple of men were hung and were probably innocent, and then he takes that fact and turns it into a drama about one virtuous man,” Ruhl says. She’s written period drama before, such as “In the Next Room,” which is set in the late 19th century, but here it soon became apparent that a modern angle was the way to go. “First I wanted to write an alternative history of the Salem witch trials, and it became such a burden,” she says. “I thought I would research until I was 90 in order to write it.” Certainly, the current political climate also informed the story Ruhl wanted to tell. “A lot of the play was written while I was feeling a certain amount of rage about the discourse around women in the culture,” she says. “Looking at Trump’s campaign and how he would get masses of people to shout ‘lock her up,’ and thinking about him yelling ‘witch hunt, witch hunt, witch hunt’ even as he’s grabbing women’s vaginas, it’s like there’s an Orwellian reversal of language. The victimhood of witches Trump is claiming for himself.”