Miller time Gamm’s Crucible casts a spell by Bill Rodriguez
	The Crucible By Arthur Miller. Directed by Fred Sullivan Jr. With Anthony Estrella, Jeanine Kane, Jim O’Brien, Chris Byrnes, Georgia Cohen, and Sam Babbitt. At Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through September 21.

This is quite an auspicious start for the Gamm, as they’d now like to be called. The resurrected Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre is beginning a full season after a year-long hiatus to regroup. For their opener, in a borrowed theater at La Salle Academy, they chose quite a challenge, and have succeeded magnificently.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is rightly an American classic, allegorically examining both the collective mind and soul of the nation with lyrical gravity. Magically, the play soars while remaining firmly grounded. Trouble is, this tale of the 1692 Salem witchcraft hysteria, and resulting hangings, had better be performed flawlessly, or else the magic is gone and we’re left with lofty notions, stilted language, and a bunch of hyper-hormonal girls running around the stage shrieking. With this drama, a good ol’ college try can be quite dreadful.

Gamm pulls off this theatrical feast with the usual ingredients: apt casting, skilled critical performances, solid production values, and directorial finesse. Everything is at the service of getting the production out of the way of the play, which can then show us how it garnered a 1962 Pulitzer and has embedded itself into the national psyche as firmly as Joe McCarthy and déjà vu over churchly arrogance.

The plot shows how perfectly logical consequences, if they proceed from inflexibly dogmatic assumptions, can quickly escalate into insane actions. (Miller had the Army-McCarthy hearings in mind. Feel free to plug in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq, etc.) The Rev. Samuel Parris (Chris Burns) has interrupted his daughter and other village girls dancing in the woods after midnight with his Barbados servant Tituba (Tammy Brown). His daughter is catatonic with fright, so witchcraft is suspected, which brings in a well-reputed Puritan exorcist, the Rev. John Hale (Jim O’Brien). To cover up her lying, one of the girls involved, Abigail Williams (Georgia Cohen), pretends the devil made her do it. Then everything falls to Hell.

Abigail becomes the ringleader as the other girls join in and, to prove they are penitent, claim they’ve seen certain women of the village in the company of Satan. Abigail still yearns for John Proctor (Anthony Estrella), whose wife dismissed her as a servant after her husband confessed to adultery. So it is only a matter of time before the good, if still resentful, Elizabeth Proctor (Jeanine Kane) is accused of being a witch.

Under the sure, unobtrusive hand of Trinity’s Fred Sullivan Jr., the direction pulls out some fine performances. (I love the little touches: he has the Rev. Parris stride forward when he interrupts the head of the court on one occasion, which amusingly underscores Parris’s timidity when he retreats.) Miller has set up many relationships to be fraught with tension, so the play offers a wealth of resonating set pieces. Estrella’s carefully nuanced scenes with Kane and Cohen, his wife and her accuser, certainly rivet our attention. Act one ends with John Proctor declaiming, "We are naked, and God’s icy wind will blow." Such lofty language, which Miller uses so well to lift this tale’s horrors out of the gloom of history, needs quite good acting to not sound stilted.

Numerous other roles are pitch perfect. My favorites include Tom Oakes and Enedina Garcia, who provide much needed amiability as Giles Corey and Rebecca Nurse, to offset all the somberness, and Ratkanhnha Siv in both the courageous and frail modes of young accuser Mary Warren. Sam Babbitt is appropriately full-volumed as the pompous Gov. Danforth, and Mark McClure puts the spunk of self-righteousness behind the shyness of court scribe Ezekiel Cheever.

As black-box theater taught us long ago, set and costume design is as much about not breaking the mood as creating an impression. With that in mind, David T. Howard has given us a simple rough plank façade, an upper-level walkway leading to simple cut-out doors. When we can only hear the action that takes place on the other side, light slivers out from the cracks between the boards, so we feel appropriately shut out. Ironically, this has the similar effect of involving us as did Eugene Lee’s 1965-66 season Crucible set at Trinity Rep, which placed us inside the Puritan meeting house, surrounded by raw barn board. Costumes, also Howard’s design, are realistic, for a helpfully literal connection with the 17th century.

Come November, Gamm’s next production will be in its new transitional digs, in the annex of the Pawtucket Armory, which is being transformed into an arts center. If The Crucible is what this theater company can accomplish while homeless, we have quite an eyeful in store when they finally nestle in.