24 September 2006: Miller The Crucible
Shaw Festival. Festival Theatre. Directed by Tadeusz Brodecki
An engrossing, almost terrifying, and moving production of Miller’s play, a work that in some ways far transcends its own time and in other ways seems to cry out for an interpretation that draws pointed analogies to our own time and place. (One feels the urge to send a copy of the play to the personal attention of George W. Bush with instructions to study carefully the part of Mr. Danforth.)
A drop curtain covering the entire width and height of the large Festival Theatre proscenium depicts an endless forest of snow-covered pines, straight and upright, speaking of continuing strength and survival in the bleakest of winters. Lights come up behind it to some small extent, and through the semi-transparency of the scrim we can see the outline figures of the pilgrim community, their arms raised in ostensible prayer, as a chorus of mixed voices is heard in a hymn. The lights dim again, the drop is flown, the small community of pilgrims goes off, the lights come up again, and we are in an upstairs bedroom in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris.
Here, the background is a very large rectangular structure comprised of the double row of panels the size of large doors. In this first scene the structure is tilted forward at least thirty degrees, to simulate the idea of a bedroom under the eaves of the house; in subsequent scenes it will be set vertically to mark the wall of John Proctor’s house, the vestry of the Salem Meeting House, and a cell in Salem jail, with doors fixed in various locations in the panels. In accomplishing these changes the entire apparatus spins at a fast rate, and we are conscious of a sort of wheelhouse of ropes and gears at the side, almost as if the structure was a gigantic rack on which puny human beings might be tortured.
Thus, the atmosphere of oppressive gloom that hangs over the entire proceedings from beginning to end. It is a masterfully well-constructed play, with a clear rising conflict in each scene that builds in intensity and momentum, as the life and soul of that ordinary, representative man John Proctor are gradually and with mounting speed enmeshed in and consumed by the combination of hysteria and mendacity that tears this community apart.
The action of the play takes on a strong sense of the inevitable, in perhaps more than one way. In hanging so many people, Danforth has committed himself to a course of action from which there is no turning away; mercy has no place in these proceedings. Correlating with this inevitability is what turns out to be John Proctor’s own personal inevitable movement toward a crisis that he alone must face, head-on, with himself: what does it mean to be John Proctor, to be the man that he is? What does that name stand for, what does it mean? And when he signs his name to a statement of guilt, is the mere writing of it a private act or unavoidably a public one? These are consuming questi