Salem's lot

The Crucible isn't the trial of the century

by Steve Vineberg

THE CRUCIBLE By Arthur Miller. Directed by Nym Cooke. Set designed by Jim Allen and Barbara Marchesani. Costumes by Tammy Cote. Lighting by Tom Powers. With Richard Clark, Christine Creelman, Charles Clark, Rachael Waite, Jeremy Woloski, Joseph P. Godfrey, Shannon Ouellette, Melissa Jean-Charles, Tim Waite, and Sandy Pickens. At Barre Players, through June 21.

When you read The Crucible, you think you see right through it. Yet like other Arthur Miller plays -- Death of a Salesman, All My Sons -- it's not really about what it pretends to be about; it fools readers (and the generations of high-school English teachers who have taught it), just as it seems to have fooled Miller himself. Miller presents himself as an intellectual, but he works in the tired genre of the social-problem play, and his ideas are dopey. The Crucible is set in 17th-century Salem, but, as everyone knows, it's the playwright's response to McCarthyism -- his literal transcription of the popular phrase "McCarthy witch hunts." But the play works least well, I think, as a dramatic metaphor for that era, because it's both overexpicit (especially in Judge Danforth's courtroom speech dividing the Salem community into advocates and enemies of the court) and unconvincing. The specifics of the dramatic situation don't correspond with the specifics of the historical one, no matter how generous you're inclined to be about poetic license. As an allegory, Miller's play simplifies the McCarthy era out of recognition. As a psychological study of a group of Puritans, however -- an examination of how religious fervor not only masks other, more venal impulses but actually encourages them to fester and implode -- The Crucible can be extremely effective. Miller's a lousy intellectual but he can be a terrific dramatist.

The play, which can currently be seen in Nym Cooke's revival for the Barre Players, is about hysteria. In repressed Salem, the dancing of sexually inflamed adolescent girls around a cauldron in a midnight forest leads to the suspicion of witchcraft. When Tituba, the minister's West Indian slave, who was caught stirring that cauldron, is threatened with hanging, she "confesses" her pact with the devil and implicates the homeless and dissolute on the periphery of the community. Before long, however, the private vendettas of Salem citizens have worked their way into the accusations, and the town is destroyed by the trials of respectable women and men whose accusers are never doubted. The witchcraft charges operate like a slash in the vein of the community.

The Barre Players production is acted with spirit and maintains an admirable sense of ensemble, but it falls into the play's biggest trap. Though The Crucible is structurally a melodrama, and though it's about how melodrama runs riot in Salem, the show itself has to be carefully controlled. This version keeps going over the top. That's particularly true when Richard Clark (in the role of the tragic hero, John Proctor) is on stage. Clark bellows and screeches; he pops his eyes and makes his voice trembly. He overacts so feverishly that the character's objectives get completely lost, and in his scenes with his wife, Elizabeth (Christine Creelman), which are the most beautifully written exchanges in the play, you can't understand the dynamics of their complicated marriage. Creelman is often touching, and so are Sam Kertiles as Ann Putnam, whose sorrow and bitterness over her stillborn babies provokes the earliest accusations, and Robert Solari as Francis Nurse, whose patient, sweet-tempered wife is the eventual victim of Ann's grief-fed fury. At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Melissa Jean-Charles makes a suitably flamboyant Tituba.

The set design by Jim Allen and Barbara Marchesani divides the small playing area into two sections in an attempt to deal with the demands of a four-setting script. But perhaps another approach -- an undifferentiated unit set -- might have worked better: in act one especially, the actors have so little room to move about that they're practically tripping over one another. The production has been carefully researched, and Cooke has made some interesting choices in his use of music. On the other hand, his decision to put back a scene Miller elected to cut -- between Proctor and the manipulative Abigail (Rachael Waite), whose sexual jealousy is at the heart of the hysteria -- wasn't well thought out. It's not only a terrible scene, introducing motivation for Abigail that's unsupported by the rest of the text, but it's at odds with the chronology of the story. When you fall in love with a play, it's always tempting to resurrect excised material, but in this area as in the realm of acting, The Crucible needs to be pared down, not built up.