The new theater season at the St. Louis Repertory started earlier this month. I have season tickets to see all the shows on the Main Stage. The first show this season was The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
The Crucible loosely outlines the events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. (See a brief timeline.) The Crucible is one of those plays that is difficult to get a standing ovation from. Everything about this production was great, acting, direction, set, lighting, and costume design, but at the end of the play I was just angry. Angry with the girls who were trying to cover up their own transgressions (in Miller’s version of the story at least) at the expense of over 20 lives, angry with pious, power hungry and self involved “judges” who were really only concerned with maintaining their power, and angry with the sniveling, and weak minded Rev. Parris who was trying to ensure that his good name was not dragged through the mud to the point of being an accomplice in the hangings and then trying to undo what he had help create when he thought his life was in danger near the end of the play.
It is amazing to think that the events of this play are inspired by actual events. People were killed because of false accusations made by a group of mostly children. The play was written during the events of a more modern “witch hunt,” McCarthyism, a time in which Miller found himself blacklisted.
It should be noted that Miller did not intend for this to be a non-fiction work. His play is inspired by the events in Salem in 1692.
Here is what Miller had to say about the historical accuracy of his play:
“This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian. Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one; the number of girls involved in the ‘crying out’ has been reduced; Abigail’s age has been raised; while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hawthorne and Danforth. However, I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history. The fate of each character is exactly that of his historical model, and there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar-and in some cases exactly the same-role in history.
“As for the characters of the persons, little is known about most of them except what may be surmised from a few letters, the trial record, certain broadsides written at the time, and references to their conduct in sources of varying reliability. They may therefore be taken as creations of my own, drawn to the best of my ability in conformity with their known behavior, except as indicated in the commentary I have written for this text.”
For a brief listing of some of the historical inaccuracies in this play visit Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: Fact & Fiction
Next month is Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I will need to be doing a little research about the play before I go see it, so I can keep my head above water.
Class dismissed!
PS The title of this post comes from a line in The Crucible when one of the townspeople comments on how heavy the books are that Rev. Hale carries. Rev. Hale responds they are weighted down with authority.
