The Peterborough Theatre Guild is bringing an updated version of celebrated American playwright Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible to the Guild Hall stage for 10 performances in late January and early February.
The Crucible is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692 and 1693, in which more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 14 women and five men were executed by hanging. From about 1450 to 1750, witch-hunts in Europe and colonial America resulted in an estimated 35,000 to 50,000 executions.
Miller wrote The Crucible as an allegory for McCarthyism — a period during the late 1940s and 1950s when Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy led his own witch-hunt for alleged communists living in the U.S. Ironically, Miller himself was questioned by the House of Representatives’ so-called Committee on Un-American Activities three years after he wrote The Crucible and was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended.
First performed on Broadway in 1953, The Crucible received mostly hostile reviews and Miller himself was not pleased with the production. Despite that, the play won the 1953 Tony Award for best play, and a new production the following year was more successful. It was later revived on Broadway in both 2002 and 2016.
In 1961, the play was adapted as an opera and received the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for music. It has been also been presented several times on television and, in 1996, was produced as a film starring Paul Scofield, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Winona Ryder. For his adapted screenplay, Miller received an Academy Award nomination.
When the film version was released, Miller explained in The New Yorker why he wrote The Crucible, calling it “an act of desperation.”
“Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma — the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power,” Miller wrote. “But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.”
“I am not sure what The Crucible is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I’d not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play — the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness.”
“Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, and other regimes … But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days.”
The Peterborough Theatre Guild production will be directed by Jane Werger, produced by Linda Conway and Elaine Orgill, and brought to life by an 18-member cast. To bring the play closer to our time, the production will be set in the 1930s, according to a media release from the Peterborough Theatre Guild.
“The Crucible … is an ode to courage and conscience; a rebuke of lying and tyranny; a tender love story; a cautionary tale,” reads the media release. “This compelling drama still resonates in our social/political climate today.”
Performances take place at 7:30 p.m. on January 20 and 21, January 26 to 28, and February 2 to 4, with 2 p.m. matinee performances on January 22 and 29. While masking is encouraged at all performances, a special evening performance on February 3 will be available for those more comfortable attending a show with COVID protocols (masking will be required for that performance and there will be limited audience capacity with spaced seating).
Tickets for The Crucible are $25 for adults, $22 for seniors, and $15 for students, and are available online at peterboroughtheatreguild.com or by calling 705-745-4211. Tickets for the the February 3 performance are available by phone or by emailing Yvonne MacDougall at pearlwildmacdougall@yahoo.com.
kawarthaNOW is proud to be a media sponsor of the Peterborough Theatre Guild’s 2022-23 season.
