‘Witch Hunt’ reveals humanity of Tituba
black magic. She didn’t lead Puritan girls astray.
“Witch Hunt” gives Tituba hopes and fears, virtues and flaws. It gives her goals, and it makes her strategic in pursuit of them. In short, it makes Tituba a person.
Tituba “was ripped from her home in a violently traumatic way,” says Rene Rogoff, who plays the role. “She never went back home, dreamt her whole life of home. It’s a story of hope that never is fulfilled.” Tituba knows it’s hopeless, but “she won’t admit it . ... She’s really fighting with herself, and she’s fighting for herself at the same time.”
“It’s amazing to see how hard she fights for the little she has — and the value she finds in the little she has” — a husband in John (Steven Flores) and a baby, Rogoff continues. “For us as women, we don’t ask for a lot of what we get, but we’re better at dealing with the hand we’re dealt, as opposed to men, who get to get a new hand.”
In the new play, Tituba’s fight comes to a head when she’s on trial for witchcraft. Tituba doesn’t confess because she’s bewitched, because she bewitches others or because she’s a simpleton. She confesses “to save her family — and a little bit to just finally give it to ‘em,” says Rogoff. “If you’re pushed — and pushed and pushed and pushed — when you’re finally given the opportunity to push back, you take it.”
In earlier drafts, Lashof says, “it was reading as if they just break her down, so she blurts it out. Now it’s reading like ... ‘You want it? I’m going to give it to you, and what I’m going to give you is going to turn you back on each other.’ ”
Lashof and Rogoff both had anxieties about telling Tituba’s story — Lashof in part because “I’m an old white lady,” Rogoff in part because “I look white, and a lot of people assume that I’m white.” (She identifies as mixedrace.) It was a lot of pain to dive into. They felt a responsibility to get the story right, after others have gotten it wrong so often, for so long.
But the collaborators promised to have each other’s backs while holding each other to account. For example, in development of the play, Lashof recalls, “I kept trying to write about (Tituba) from the point of view of the white characters,” to which Vega asked, “When are you going to let her talk?”
In the telling and retelling of the Salem witch trials, Vega says the blame has been put on different causes. “Some periods of history, like (for) Miller, people blame it on sex. Sometimes people blame it on factionalism. Sometimes people blame it on England,” she says. One theory blames rye poisoning; still another blames anxieties about Native Americans.
“We are so scared of it because there wasn’t a net — there was nothing to stop it,” Vega explains. “We want to blame it on all of these things because we don’t want to blame it on American society, and we don’t want to blame it on human nature, and we don’t want to blame it on all of the things that are still happening right now.”
That thinking gives people false comfort, she posits. But with the trials, Vega adds, “nobody knows how it started, or why it stopped.”
“We are so scared of it because there wasn’t a net — there was nothing to stop it.” Elizabeth Vega, director of “Witch Hunt,” on the Salem witch trials