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.

This January, renowned Canadian actor Steve Ross is reprising his starring role in New Stages Theatre Company’s new production of the hit solo play Every Brilliant Thing, running for five performances at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in downtown Peterborough.

Both heart wrenching and hilarious, Every Brilliant Thing tells the story of an unnamed narrator’s journey from boyhood to adulthood while creating a list for his clinically depressed mother of everything in the world that makes life worthwhile — a list that begins when he is seven years old with “ice cream,” “water fights,” and “staying up past your bedtime and being allowed to watch TV” and continues to expand throughout his life until it takes on a life of its own.

Originally written by English playwright Duncan MacMillan as a short story in 2009, Every Brilliant Thing become a theatrical collaboration between MacMillan and Irish stand-up comedian and actor Jonny Donahoe, who used his comedic improvisation skills to help develop the play — which relies on interaction with the audience.

First performed by Donahoe at the Ludlow Fringe Festival in 2013, the play went on to a critically acclaimed run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2014, before opening in Barrow Street Theater in New York City later that year, with one of Donahoe’s off-Broadway performances filmed for a 2015 HBO special.

Reviewing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe production, The Guardian called it “one of the funniest plays you’ll ever see about depression — and possibly one of the funniest plays you’ll ever see, full stop.”

A long-time member of the Stratford Festival company, Ross will be reprising the role he first performed in a New Stages production of Every Brilliant Thing in January 2020, just before the pandemic. Directed by Linda Kash, the play had a sold-out nine-show run at the intimate black-box theatre The Theatre on King in downtown Peterborough.

VIDEO: HBO trailer for “Every Brilliant Thing” performed by Johnny Donahoe

“Every audience differs by who they are and what they bring to the table,” Ross told kawarthaNOW in 2020. “It also feels like this show is different with every actor who does it. Because the show is conversational, the line is immediately blurred.”

Directed by Randy Read, the January production of Every Brilliant Thing is being staged at the larger Market Hall Performing Arts Centre, with performances at 7:30 p.m. from Wednesday, January 18th through Saturday, January 21st, with a 1 p.m. matinee performance on Sunday, January 22nd.

“With humour and warmth, Stratford actor Steve Ross is simply remarkable in the lead role, a man who reflects back on his family life, his encounters with depression, and how he’s found a way to keep going in difficult times,” reads a New Stages description of the production. “A perfect play for our times, Every Brilliant Thing is a much-needed reminder of all the little things that make life worth living.”

General admission tickets are $30 ($15 for arts workers, students, or the underwaged) and are available in person at the Market Hall box office at 140 Charlotte Street from 12 to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday or online anytime at tickets.markethall.org.

Note: Every Brilliant Thing has a trigger warning for themes of suicide and is not recommended for children 13 and younger.

For more information about New Stages Theatre Company, its current season, and for season subscriptions, visit www.newstages.ca.

kawarthaNOW is proud to be media sponsor of New Stages Theatre Company’s 25th anniversary season.

This story has been updated with the following correction: Randy Read, not Linda Kash, is directing the 2023 production.

Every Thursday, we publish live music events at pubs and restaurants in Peterborough and the greater Kawarthas region based on information that venues provide to us directly or post on their website or social media channels. Here are the listings for the week of Thursday, December 29 to Wednesday, January 4, 2023.

If you’re a pub or restaurant owner and want to be included in our weekly listings, please email our nightlifeNOW editor at nightlife@kawarthanow.com. For concerts and live music events at other venues, check out our Concerts & Live Music page.

With the exception of karaoke, we only list events with performing musicians. Venues may also host other events during the week (e.g., dancing, DJs, comedy shows).