WHAT
Idaho Shakespeare Festival's "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller
WHERE
Idaho Shakespeare Amphitheater, 5657 Warm Springs Ave., Boise
WHEN
8 p.m. Friday, (preview), Saturday (opening night) and 7 p.m. Sunday, (family night); and 8 p.m. June 19-20, 24-25, 28, July 3-4, 19, 22-23; 7 p.m. June 29 and July 20
TICKETS
$28-$38 Fridays-Saturdays, $21-$29 Sundays and Tuesdays-Thursdays. Preview (Friday, June 13): $23 reserved, $16 general. Family night (Sunday, June 15): $29 reserved, $21 general, $12 children 6-17. 336-9221, www.idahoshakespeare.org.
Take a hike in the Boise Foothills and you find anthills. But disturb one of these seemingly benign little mounds of plain brown earth, and you'll discover the raw, instinctual maneuvers of survival as these tiny creatures, exposed, try to regain control.
People are not that much different, said actor Andrew May.
"It's like you take the lid off and you see this panic and all the things they do to protect themselves," May said.
Humans are not that much different. There is a method of madness and an instinctual pattern of survival in how people react to extreme stress, fear and uncertainty.
Arthur Miller dissects that psychology of social panic and mass hysteria in "The Crucible," which opens next weekend at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival.
The play is about the Salem witch trials in 1692, but was written as an allegory for the McCarthy Era. Now in post-9/11 America it again rings authentically true, said Drew Barr, who directed this production at Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland, and will reinvent it for the ISF outdoor amphitheater.
"Ultimately, this is an incredible piece of writing," Barr said. "Miller is a rare playwright who is able to use language and structure to bore deep inside character and situation and move audiences."
There's a surprising timelessness to events like the Salem witch trials and McCarthy hearings, said Laura Perrotta, who plays Elizabeth Proctor. "You have a group of people trying to structure a means of control to keep order in a society, and there is fallout," she said.
Miller saw this kind of human behavior at its worst at work personally when he became a target of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1948.
By the time he wrote "The Crucible" he was a savvy observer of human behavior. Miller had already written "Death of a Salesman," (1946) considered one of the greatest American plays of the 20th century.
When called before HUAC, Miller refused to give names. He was blacklisted in Hollywood, as were many of his friends and colleagues, but not in New York, where he was an established success. "The Crucible" opened on Broadway in 1953 and became a hit.
The intense emotional caldron of his committee experience and the panic he saw among his peers inspired him to reflect on another point of American history that was laced with mass hysteria and social panic — the Salem witch trials.
A crucible is a metal container for melting metal at high temperatures.
It is also a place of occasion of a severe test or trial.
In 1692, the village of Salem, Mass., became both when a group of young girls caught doing spells in the woods at night sparked one of the most riveting and terrifying events in history: the Salem witch trials.
The girls protested their piety and said they were bewitched. Based on accusations by the girls, 19 men and women were convicted of witchcraft and hung. One man was pressed to death for refusing to admit witchcraft and another 13 may have died in prison, although the records aren't clear.
What caused the actual events has been debated for years, said Drew Barr, who directed the production.
"If you think it was just hysterical adolescent girls, you're way off," he said. "It is much more complicated than that. It is very easy from outside a situation to think you know why this is going on. When you get inside of it, you realize you'll never know the truth."
Miller's play is a fiction based on historical facts, "but it feels true," Barr said.
Miller focused his play on the people of Salem, a Puritan settlement in the New World where people are trying to live by a strict code of religious discipline, while the untamed natural world looms around them.
In this version, it is human motive and desperation that fuels the madness. John Proctor (May) has a brief affair with the young Abigail Williams (Sara M. Bruner). He wants to forget it but she can't let go.
During a rite in the forest, Abigail drinks a potion to kill John's wife Elizabeth (Laura Perrotta). When Abigail and the other girls are discovered, rumors of witchcraft begin to circulate.
The girls begin accusing others of casting spells. In the meantime, Elizabeth finds out about John's affair and their relationship begins to deteriorate.
As the town spirals into total panic, and more and more people are accused, tried and jailed, the Proctors realize they have to come forward and expose Abigail. To save innocent lives they must make John's affair public. But it backfires, drawing them deeper into Abigail's web and both eventually find themselves in the crucible.
Regardless of what happened historically, Miller has his own ideas. He manipulates historical fact to tell his story, Barr said.
"This isn't historical truth but it feels like it is," he said. "In Miller's play people become very exposed. There is a sense of these people trying to live this life in a world that is a lot bigger and wilder than they are."
That aspect of the play will play out more clearly in the outdoor amphitheater than in the proscenium theater in Cleveland where the production originated, Barr said.
He mines basic human character flaws that create these situations of mass hysteria and fuel history, whether it is in Salem in 1692 or Washington, D.C., in 1950, or today.
"The Crucible," often produced by high schools, began receiving attention again after 9/11, the war on terrorism and the Iraq War created an atmosphere of near paranoia.
"Crucible" received its fourth Broadway revival in 2002.
What all the politics, metaphor and conjecture come down to, are the relationships in the play.
"And the relationships between the characters keeps changing the societal order. At the end of the day, it is a story about people who have their flaws and problems, and it is epic at the same time," Perrotta said. "Miller puts the characters in that place where we have to go and the fallout is huge."
Dana Oland: 377-6442
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