‘Witch Hunt’ reveals humanity of Tituba
For playwright, devil’s in the details of Salem’s first accused
“Witch Hunt” gives Tituba hopes and fears, virtues and flaws. It gives her goals, and it makes her strategic in pursuit of them.
Playwright Carol S. Lashof is adamant that Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” was not just a research source for her new play, “Witch Hunt.” For her, it was “a source of provocation.”
A few years ago, Lashof reread the 1953 classic, which uses historical figures from the Salem witch trials to critique McCarthyism. First, she said she “came across the information that Abigail Williams was not the 17yearold vamp that Arthur Miller portrayed” but an 11yearold child at the time of the trials. Abigail’s exlover in the play, John Proctor, was 60 years old in real life.
Feeling “ticked off,” Lashof went down a research rabbit hole, where she found another egregious — and a more artistically fruitful — discrepancy in Miller’s portrayal of Tituba, a slave who was among the first accused of witchcraft and the first to confess to the crime, implicating others in it and further inflaming Puritans’ fears.
That discovery is at the center of “Witch Hunt,” Lashof ’s reframing of Tituba’s life, which runs through Aug. 4 at La Val’s Subterranean Theater, directed by Elizabeth Vega.
For Lashof, Tituba both offered “the most interesting story to tell” and “revealed the most, to me, about the depths of my prior ignorance.” According to biographer Elaine Breslaw, Tituba wasn’t African, in contrast to her portrayal in “The Crucible” as a “1950s mammy,” as Vega puts it. She was indigenous, likely from South America before she was sold into slavery in Barbados. She didn’t practice