PLAY REVIEW EXAMPLE
Relearning the Lesson of Miller's 'Crucible'
{DESCRIPTION OF THE SCRIPT/STORY/AUTHOR/HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE,
ETC.} ''The Crucible'' is not only Arthur Miller's most-produced play; it has also become his
most continually relevant work of political theater. By focusing on the Salem witch hunts of the
17th century, the playwright placed the outrage of McCarthyism in historical perspective and
created a drama that has remained meaningful to succeeding generations. Gerald Freedman's
articulate revival at the Roundabout Theater Company is as resolute as the play itself.
{THE PLAY’S THEMES} In the hands of different directors and actors, and with slight
alteration in emphasis, each of the three revivals illustrates the consequential themes of the
play: the epidemic of evil, the perversion of religion and civil order and the way that decency can
outlive even the most disquieting events. For the playwright, justice and jurisprudence will
always triumph over the immediate inequities of the legal system.
{DESCRIPTION OF THE CHARACTER} The firm moral center of this insane universe is
Elizabeth Proctor, a woman unable to tell a lie, except to try to save her husband's life.
Depending on the performance, Elizabeth can seem sanctimonious, a good wife preoccupied
with self-denial. {ANALYSIS/DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTOR’S PERFORMANCE OF
THE CHARACTER} In her restrained but moving performance, Harriet Harris avoids that
danger, giving Elizabeth a firm individual identity before she has to face their joint crisis.
With equal perspicacity, Randle Mell {ANALYSIS/DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTOR’S
PERFORMANCE} studiously avoids making Proctor {CHARACTER} seem heroic or even
stoic, at least until his final act of conscience. He is willful and temperamental, a more
emotionally highstrung Proctor than is customary. Demanding that Mary Warren, Abigail's
acolyte, testify in defense of his wife, he grabs the girl by the throat and lifts her off her feet,
holding her aloft as if she were a rag doll. In this and other moments, Mr. Mell becomes a man
enraged. The performances by him and Ms. Harris certify the strength of the couple's bond. For
Mr. Mell's Proctor, the liaison with Abigail has been an aberration, a misstep but not something
to shake his enduring attachment to his wife.
Abigail {CHARACTER} is character assassin as catalyst. From her first entrance, Justine
Bateman {ACTRESS} making her New York stage debut – projects the character's nervous
intensity, a near demonism that derives from her rebuffed sensuality. A self-dramatizer, she
drops her abrasiveness in a quiet plea for Proctor's love. When he rejects her for the last time,
she moves unswervingly on her course of vengeance
{ANALYSIS/DESCRIPTION OF THE SET} Using Christopher H. Barreca's spare,
woodhewn set, Mr. Freedman's production is unadorned. Performed within a proscenium, the
play loses a sense of a surrounding environment. No longer do we feel the swirl of predators
around their prey. But the production compensates by focusing the audience's attention on the
three principal characters and the central dramatic conflict.
{CONCLUSION} In Mr. Miller's apt words, the play deals with ''one of the strangest and most
awful chapters in human history.'' Though the basic events are true, one always greets them with
incredulity. Even today, with formerly repressive nations promoting individual liberty, the
scourge that the playwright first identified in the 1950's remains a lingering global presence. In
revival, ''The Crucible'' leaves disturbing reverberations.