Devil's Playground

Every new generation can glean fresh meaning from Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Now onstage at Addison's WaterTower Theatre in a stark but precisely rendered production directed by Terry Martin, the play never seems out of date. Such is its legacy as one of the finest tragedies of the 20th century. And such is the likelihood that no matter the moment in modern American history, some egregious abuse of power is under way and some new ideological war threatens to tip a vulnerable segment of the American populace toward mass hysteria.

The Crucible explores just such a phenomenon: the 1692 Salem witch trials. Motivated by mischief, jealousy or, as one theory has it, hallucinations brought on from eating moldy bread, girls in the remote Massachusetts village succumbed to fits and fainting spells and began accusing their elders of trafficking with the devil. Puritan government officials believed them. Out of fear, neighbor informed on neighbor, and some 400 men and women were imprisoned on rumors of satanic activity. Torture was used to extract confessions. Nineteen were hanged. The ugly yearlong episode came to an end only when the wife of the colony's governor was named a witch. After that, higher-ups suddenly snapped to their senses. The girls were deemed mentally incompetent, and hundreds of their victims were released from jail.

The play stands as an epic metaphor for political corruption. Miller meant it as a parable mirroring the communist "witch hunts" of the 1950s, and was driven to write it, he explained in an essay published in 2000, by events directly surrounding the release of the movie version of Death of a Salesman. Columbia Pictures had fallen under the beady gaze of Senator Joe McCarthy, just revving up his red-baiting campaign in the early 1950s. Salesman, which had won Miller the 1949 Pulitzer, had drawn fire as pinko propaganda for its anti-business (and therefore anti-American) depiction of a lowly salesman, Willy Loman, driven to suicide by heartless bosses who cast him out of the job he's poured his life into.

The American Legion threatened to picket movie theaters showing Salesman. Columbia leaned on Miller to sign an anti-communist loyalty oath, which the playwright wouldn't do. To avoid being labeled commie sympathizers, the studio produced its own piece of pro-American rah-rah--a tacky short called The Life of a Salesman extolling the joys of a sales career and painting Loman as a mental case--and tacked it onto every print of the Miller film. "Never in show business history has a studio spent so much good money to prove that its feature film was pointless," Miller later wrote.

Subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Miller refused to name names. He was declared in contempt and threatened with prison. All would have been forgiven if he had paraded his new wife, Marilyn Monroe, before the panel as requested. He declined, was found guilty of the contempt charge and paid a fine.

After that ordeal, Miller said he felt he had slipped into a surreal realm of "free-floating apprehension." Intrigued by a book about the Salem witch trials, he immersed himself in actual trial transcripts and started writing The Crucible (using names taken from the Salem cases) as an attack on those who would abuse their power as a means to quell dissent.

Seeing The Crucible now is to realize how relevant Miller's message remains. Substitute "terrorism" for "witchcraft" and feel the sting of recognition in lines like the one uttered by Deputy-Governor Danforth in the play's tense third-act trial scene: "A person is either with this court or he is against it." They speak in the play of secret plots and dangerous beliefs in other gods. Informers are rewarded. Strict adherence to Christian principles is held up as proof of patriotism. "There is fear in the country because there is a moving plot to topple Christ in the country," declares Danforth. Sound familiar?

Without communism as bogeyman to stoke paranoia, now it is terrorism, evolution, gay marriage--any wedge issue that represents departure from right-wing orthodoxy can substitute for The Crucible's witchcraft. Not too long ago it was AIDS, and before that, women's rights. And we're not all that far removed from believing that Beelzebub moves among us. Remember the McMartin child abuse case of the 1980s? Children prompted and goaded by law enforcement accused daycare workers of bizarre satanic cult activity and sexual abuse. Similar incidents were reported coast to coast in what appeared to be a sudden epidemic of baby-killing and molestation by mysterious covens of devil worshipers. But it wasn't true. Cases later were dismissed for lack of evidence, and convictions were overturned when it was shown that the shocking details of sexual perversion and cult activity were false memories planted by prosecutors and investigators. Those events made for much smaller headlines, of course.