Salem's lot

URI's dynamic Crucible

by Johnette Rodriguez

THE CRUCIBLE. By Arthur Miller. Directed by Bryna Wortman. With Sarah Autumn Feeley, Don Cornell, Seth Remington, and Joanna Lynn Beecher. At URI Theatre through October 21.

On the surface, the psychological underpinnings of Arthur Miller's 1953 The Crucible are the fear and finger-pointing that happened during the 1692 Salem witch trials (and that Miller saw happening during the '50s, with the "witch hunt" of Senator McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee). But there are other specific character traits and behavior patterns that emerge in this play, creating the dynamic push-pull of the drama. The current URI Theatre production, directed by Bryna Wortman, delineates these quite memorably.

The play opens with the sexual curiosity, the superstitions, the frantic need to belong, and the desperate desire to please that are a painful but necessary part of adolescence. When those stirrings are thwarted -- and they couldn't have been more so than under the Puritanism of 17th-century Massachusetts -- they can twist and turn into sub-human feelings of puerile rage, a maniacal need to control other people and a numbness toward the sufferings, even death, that their actions will inflict (think Columbine as well as Salem).

Wortman has directed her players with a deft hand. Their screams are piercing, their devious plots convincing, their torments quite believable. Sarah Autumn Feeley gives a strong portrayal of Abigail Williams, niece to the Reverend Parris and former housemaid to Elizabeth and John Proctor. Abigail is the spurned lover of John, and she vows revenge on Elizabeth. She is also the orphan of parents whom she saw killed by Indians, and she vows revenge on anyone she can bring under her spell, including her young friends, her uncle, even Deputy-Governor Danforth and his court.

For, indeed, the Devil is alive and well in Salem, in the deadly sins of hatred, intolerance, arrogance, pride, spitefulness, greed, and self-righteousness. The first two women -- and it was almost always the women who were accused of witchcraft -- to be jailed are a black housemaid from Barbados and a single woman who is poor and often drunk in a ditch. When Giles Corey's wife is accused, and Giles himself (played quite capably by Don Cornell) is held in contempt, when the court turns a deaf ear to his arguments, his prophecy that his neighbor, Thomas Putnam, has been finagling to get his land almost comes true.

Though Miller's skill at such characterization is evident in every scene, the crux of The Crucible, the two people whose mettle is put to the flame, are John and Elizabeth Proctor (played, respectively, with ferocious intensity by Seth Remington and quiet dignity by Joanna Lynn Beecher). For it is not only their "goodness" that is tested, it is their belief in that goodness. John comes to understand that, despite his action of adultery, he is truly forgiven by Elizabeth, and he wants to measure up to that love. He moves beyond his guilt at having corrupted Abigail, for he sees that her evil intentions reach much farther than their relationship; and he moves beyond his frustration at the blatant amorality and injustice of the court, for he realizes that only he can know his true self and be judged by his God.

Though it's always tricky for student actors to play characters with graying temples, Mauro Canepa is quite credible as the Reverend John Hale, whose conscience and common sense finally break through his religious fanaticism; and Kelly Cardin, as the aged, principled Rebecca Nurse, carries through on the posture and voice of an elderly person. Andrew Lidestri, as the prideful, power-hungry Reverend Parris, finds his stride in the second half of the play. And veteran actor Richard A. Blue strikes all the right (and horrifying) notes as Deputy-Governor Danforth, whose own fears of popular condemnation push him (in Miller's interpretation) not to pardon the innocent people he is sending to the scaffold lest he be questioned about the previous 12 he had hanged.

The actors portraying the gaggle of young girls are good, but the standouts are Angela Nash Wade as Tituba and Pamela Kristine Calci as Mary Warren. Wade's delivery of an Island accent, punctuated with her facial gestures and body language, make Tituba very real. Calci, as the young girl who tries to expose the poisonous group she had been a part of, gives a wrenching and mesmerizing performance.

For all the tragic consequences of the Salem witch trials and the infamous place they have taken in the history of this country, they lasted only a few months (in contrast to the years of the McCarthy era). But when such a hardline conservative position as the ruling government and religion in Puritan Massachusetts takes hold, it can take generations to undo the harm inflicted on those who have conflicting views or live their lives in different, albeit upstanding, ways. The Crucible is a timely play, not for its superficial connection with the "witches" of Halloween but for the encroaching elections, which bedevil us all.