Whatever was anticipated or expected from the provocative and always challenging director Ivo Van Hove, his unique approach to the classics (A View from the Bridge) as well as to modern works (Lazarus) virtually insured us a stunning and arresting revival of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Be prepared for a staging that more than equates this classic drama to its theme and to its relevancy in today’s world.
The mass hysteria that the Salem witch-hunt provoked in the 17th century was no more or less insidious an epidemic than the one McCarthyism fostered during the 1950s. We need never forget the political, moral, and ethical issues on trial, in either century, thanks to Miller’s arresting drama of rampant intolerance and misguided religiosity. The Crucible is the play he wrote in 1953 specifically to denounce the prevalent inequities of so-called justice.
In yet another century, and in the light of the most recent and horrific events that surround us and invade our consciousness, the sixty-three-year-old play asks us if we are prepared and willing to be tested again, to see how one’s rage and fear is apt to be manipulated and used to create another witch-hunt? Just when I thought I’d had enough of Miller’s award winning classic, it has been given a hauntingly illuminating and thought-provoking production at the Walter Kerr Theater.
With a highly controlled amount of hysteria, van Hove is giving us a most chilling and non site-specific consideration of Miller’s troubling play. The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, with its not too subtle political analogies, were dramatized by Miller to not only pontificate on the general evils of superstition and mass hysteria, but to vividly recreate a time when these human and inhuman aberrations lived in a society that feared both God and the devil, in equal propensity. The Crucible tells the tale of innocent people victimized by a jealous, lecherous girl and her young followers when their devilish fantasies get out of control.
As performed on designer Jan Versweyveld’s grandly abstracted/minimalist stage setting, made evocative largely by his own somber lighting designs, the plot abounds, sometimes chaotically, in accusations, denials, threats, and confessions. This havoc unfolds as the misguided minister Reverend Paris (Jason Butler Harner) and the Deputy Governor Danforth (Ciaran Hinds) interrogate the good citizens of Salem, Mass. Harner is infuriating as a clergyman blinded by his own self-serving goals, as is Hinds as the chillingly stiff-necked and arrogant law enforcer. While the household of adulterous farmer John Proctor (Ben Whishaw) and his reverential, loving wife Elizabeth (Sophie Okonedo) is the central focus, the the townspeople’s involvement makes for riveting cameo scenes.
