THE CRUCIBLE
by Arthur Miller
Prologue - A Forest near Salem, Massachusetts. Spring, 1692. Night.
Act 1, Scene 1 - The following afternoon in a Small Bedroom in the home
of Reverend Samuel Parris.
Act 1, Scene 2 - Eight Days Later in the home of John and Elizabeth Proctor.
INTERMISSION
Act 2, Scene 1 - A month later in the woods near the home of
Reverend Parris
Act 2, Scene 2 - The following Day in the Salem Meeting House
Act 2, Scene 3 - Three Months Later in the town jail cells and main room
of the Salem Meeting House.
A partially fictionalized tale of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the late 1600s. The story follows a group of girls who accuse upstanding women and men in town of witchcraft to divert suspicion from their own activities. A modern allegory for Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist crusades of the 1950s.
"A Note On The Historical Accuracy Of This Play" by Arthur Miller
This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian. Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many charcters 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 Danforth. However, I believe that the audience 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 excepting 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 be the best of my ability in conformity with their known behavior.
