Going on a witch hunt
The Crucible
The Crucible, a classic of American theater, tethers two important events in United States history by exploring how rumor-mongering and fear of the unknown can destroy individuals and communities. In 1953, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller dramatized the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, the Hollywood blacklist, and the House Un-American Activities Committee, commonly known as HUAC — to which he was later summoned to testify and asked to name names. Miller used the wild and rampant accusations of supernatural evil-doing by teenage girls against adults — mostly women — in the late 17th century to stand in for the federal government’s attempt to purge the country of Communists and their sympathizers in the middle part of the 20th. The Red Scare ruined careers and friendships, while the Salem witch trials resulted in the deaths of 20 innocent people. Miller knew it was an imperfect analogy, writing in his 1987 biography, Timebends: A Life, “‘There are Communists,’ it would be repeatedly said, ‘but there were never any witches.’ I did not wish to evade this point, there was no need to; my obligation was still solely to myself and to the material.”
Scott Harrison directs The Crucible for Ironweed Productions, opening Thursday, Oct. 26, at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. He is not keen on drawing a one-to-one comparison between the action of the play and McCarthyism, or between the religious hysteria of 1692 and the Trump era. “It’s too easy,” he said. Harrison’s interest is in putting on a play that is legitimately terrifying. “People in power operating out of a sense of fear, so people have to accuse or be accused, because the powers that be have created this environment of finger-pointing — that is really scary to me. But we also want it to be literally scary. The girls making the accusations get a group energy going and feed off each other. They definitely seem like they could really be possessed. We knew we had to make it real enough that the other characters could really be convinced by them. Otherwise the audience is too far outside of the story, and they can just look at everyone in Salem as foolish for believing in witchcraft.”
Absurd as it might seem in the modern era, thinking witches were real was not a temporary mass delusion among Salem’s townspeople. According to Stacy Schiff’s scholarly book on the topic, The Witches: Salem,
1692 (Little, Brown, 2015), people at the time “no more doubted the reality of sorcery than the literal truth of the Bible; to do so was to question the sun shining at noon.”
The play opens on the sickbed of Betty Parris (Avonlea Ward). The night before, her father, Rev. Samuel Parris (Steven Berrier), caught her dancing around a bonfire with Tituba (Danielle Reddick), his slave, and his niece, Abigail Williams (Tara Khozein). Betty hasn’t moved or spoken since, and Tituba is worried about her. Tituba speaks the first line in the play: “My Betty be hearty soon?” she asks, hovering behind the reverend, who casts her out of the room.
The villagers, many of whom crowd the parlor below, are already talking of witchcraft, and soon Parris is sold on this explanation for his daughter’s deviant nighttime revelry and subsequent lethargy. Once Abigail, and then a revived Betty, admit to having joined Tituba in consorting with the devil, all-out chaos ensues. The girls, joined by many of their friends, accuse hundreds of people of committing supernatural acts. They writhe in pain while in court, insisting witches are hurting them via spectral projection. Abigail accuses Elizabeth Proctor (Kate Kita), for whom she used to work as a servant, though Abigail was fired for sleeping with Elizabeth’s husband, John (Todd Anderson). Miller based The Crucible on historical events but took plenty of liberties, including aging the real-life Abigail from eleven or twelve years old to seventeen.
“I fell in love and had deep feelings when I was seventeen, so I definitely think she was in love with him, and that she puts everything on the line for him,” Khozein said. “I don’t get a lot of chances to play the antagonist, but in getting to know Abigail, I realized that she can’t ever be the antagonist to me. The more she’s motivated by things that are really good, the more I find in her. For Abigail, goodness is a world where she ends up with John Proctor, and is married and happy. I think her understanding of evil is hypocrisy — which she sees all around her in her community.”
Abigail is sometimes portrayed as having a malicious agenda, but Harrison is cognizant of the historical context, in which Abigail would have been rendered a ruined woman due in large part to the weak will of her married employer. “Proctor isn’t an innocent by any means,” he said. “He consummated a relationship with a seventeen-yearold servant, and then, several times in the play, he calls her a whore. Abigail isn’t a complete innocent either, and she has a deeply wounded background. Her parents were murdered, and she feels deeply betrayed by Proctor.”
Though Harrison might not intend to draw overt lines between this production and today’s sociopolitical environment, they exist nonetheless. The Salem witch trials are often pinned on the hysteria of teenage girls, but the situation was far more complex than that, inextricable from the community’s literal interpretation of the Bible, constant infighting and suspicion among neighbors for trivial offenses, and the interests of men to decide what is proper behavior for women. (In the play, Martha Corey is accused not long after her husband wonders aloud why she reads so much.) Current news headlines illustrate Christian fundamentalism’s influence on women’s reproductive healthcare options, as well as serious allegations by famous women of sexual coercion at the hands of powerful men. There is also an ongoing conversation about the representation of people of color in film and other media. Miller, it should be noted, was as much a product of his time as the Puritans in Salem were of theirs. Though the play is artistically empathetic to their Bible-based belief in witchcraft, Miller never asserted that the accused actually practiced it. He had other ideas about Salem’s enslaved class. “I had no doubt that Tituba, Reverend Parris’s black Barbados slave, had been practicing witchcraft with the girls,” he wrote in Timebends.
During the rehearsal process, Reddick, Khozein, and other cast members improvised dancing around a bonfire in the woods — the unseen offstage moment that is the catalyst for all the commotion. In their dramatic vision, the girls love Tituba and want to know about her culture, and they want to be outside, frolicking in the dark, acting a little subversive. “It was interesting to improvise this, but I always have to negotiate my baggage,” Reddick said. “It’s tricky. It almost feels like paying my dues as a black actress to play a role like this. I can hear my mother’s voice, her concern about me doing roles that black actresses tend to do, the roles we get to win Oscars for. She was never on board with that. And this isn’t a bad role, but still I have to go through a sort of gauntlet.”
Maybe Tituba was consorting with the devil, Reddick said. That doesn’t make her a bad witch. “The way I’ve been dealing with her relationship with the devil is to see him as almost this Pan figure — fun, sexy, and gregarious. She says that in Barbados, he’s just a sweetie. It’s not a Christian perspective, but she’s trapped in this other world of Salem where they have this twisted idea about everything, and she’s victim to their culture.”
details
Ironweed Productions presents The Crucible, by Arthur Miller Opens 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 26; through Nov. 12; 7 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia $17-$25, discounts available; www.ironweedcrucible.brownpaper tickets.com; 800-838-3006
The girls making the accusations get a group energy going and feed off each other. They definitely seem like they could be really possessed. — director Scott Harrison