In 1951, Senator Joseph McCarthy started Senate hearings, sponsored by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), created to investigate allegations of communist activity in the United States. The committee called high profile suspects to testify. The pressure to name names was intense, and those who fell under suspicion were blacklisted. In the conservative, conformist world of the 1950s, without a chance to clear his name, anyone suspected of communist sympathies might suddenly find himself without friends and without a job.
Playwright Arthur Miller wanted to speak out on this subject. Biographer Martin Gottfried writes, “The terrorizing search for Communists—McCarthyism, as it was being called—was frequently characterized as a witch hunt, a reference to the historic events in 1692 Massachusetts…. Miller was fascinated by [the] parallel between HUAC and Salem. In 20th-century America as in 17th-century Salem, once the heretic was accused no defense of innocence was available. Acquittal was possible only through confession and disavowal. This intrigued Miller, the notion of confessed sin—even sin falsely confessed—being the equivalent of virtue. That contemporary terror, said Miller, would underlie every word in The Crucible.”
Miller worried, however, how to find the moral center of the story. In an eye-witness account of the trial, he found a passage describing a moment between Abigail Williams and John Proctor that intrigued him: a raised fist that seemed almost to become a tender caress. Miller suddenly imagined an illicit affair between servant and master, a dramatic idea that was fortified by guilt about his own failing marriage. Miller later wrote, “That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul.”
As we bring you this classic American allegory, I hope that you will leave with a renewed respect for the power of false allegations in a world that is hungry for the salicious sound bite or tweet that might be enough to ignite suspicion and doubt where there is no rational cause for it. Miller reminds us that we owe it to our nation and humanity at large to use descretion when making assumptions and accusations that can suddenly take on a life of their own.
"By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up a new relationship between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us know more, and not merely to spend our feelings."
--Arthur Miller, from the "Introduction to his Collected Plays
We hope you enjoy this performance.
Christa Whittaker
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