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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
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 Activities Committee and for the breakdown of public discourse which engulfed Miller and thousands of other left-wing sympathizers, and changed forever both the republic's notion of and expression of dissent. "I don't think I can adequately communicate the sheer density of the atmosphere of the time," Miller writes in his collected essays, "Echoes Down the Corridor." "For the outrageous had so suddenly become the accepted norm."
The play, which is Miller's most produced work, remains one of the only theatrical remnants of those craven years. On this historical level alone, "The Crucible" is an act of extraordinary moral courage: it honors the most profound function of theatre, which is to disenchant the citizen from the spell of received opinion. But, in analyzing how hysteria plays out both in the individual and in society, "The Crucible" goes beyond polemic to something more universal and profound, and it speaks eerily even to our own terrorized moment. In Abigail Williams (the...
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