Night for day; Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" on Broadway.(two theater productions)

A great play allows itself to be seen through many lenses. Arthur Miller's "The Crucible," which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary next January and which is being given a masterly revival by Richard Eyre, at the Virginia Theatre, can be enjoyed as merely a terrific melodramatic yarn. His reimagining of the Salem witch hunt of 1692, in which nineteen people and two dogs were hanged for being in league with the Devil, cleverly combines love interest and courtroom drama. But in dramatizing the community's "rapture of murderous credulity" -- Miller's term for the public paranoia -- it also provides a cunning allegory for the blacklisting delirium of the House Un-American ...