Dance with the Devil

The Crucible

Though it was written to skewer the McCarthy era red scares of 1950s, Arthur Miller’s classic The Crucible is a timeless show. Set in Salem in 1692, the show uses the historical Salem Witch Trials to explore paranoia and suspicion, and the cost of holding to your principles. A group of teenage girls accuse a handful, then eventually hundreds of Salem residents of witchcraft, leading to hundreds of arrests and eventually, almost two dozen executions. Neighbors turn against each other as they begin to grapple with the reality that it may be safer to accuse their neighbor before he can accuse them.

It’s always something of a surprise when I see a (non-Shakespeare) play with more than three acts. It was much more common when the show was written for plays to run 3+ hours and even have more than one intermission. My theatre brain, as I assume have most audience members’ have, has been trained to expect 2.5 hours with one intermission at the outside. Combine that with the intense material, and this is a demanding show. That’s not a criticism. Sometimes that is the very theatre experience I’m looking for.

Part of the reason this show is so successful is how it dramatizes how quickly the extraordinarily mundane concerns and grievances of a community can fuel the fire of suspicion and paranoia. Mixed in the allegations of witchcraft are the more earthly concerns of love triangles and who gets the best piece of land near the river. More than witches, knowing that petty disagreements with your neighbor could turn violent if given permission by the state is a truly terrifying idea.

The standouts in a talented cast were first, Devon Carson as Elizabeth Proctor. She embodied a hard-earned practicality that felt very authentic to the time and place. It made her journey through the trials one of the most affecting for me. The other highlights were the girls levying the accusations, led by ringleader Abigail Williams, played by Michaela Voit. She and fellow actors, Erin Allison Stewart, Freya Trefonides, and Ellie Duffrey, and Lea Biwer really succeeded at seeming like actual teenage girls caught in a web of their own making. The accusations started as an attempt to deflect attention from some fairly ordinary teenage rule breaking, and collectively, they added just the right depth to make them, if not sympathetic exactly, certainly not cartoons.

As the audience enters the small theatre, the cast is already on stage, filling rows of chairs that alternately might be church pews or jury boxes lining the wings. The cast largely remains on stage through the first half. It’s a neat effect as you enter to meet a wall of stoic, judgmental glowering, but I think it suffers a little from diminishing returns as the witch hunt gets into full swing. The entire town has been sitting there judging metaphorically the whole time, so it’s less of a gear change when they start doing it literally. I also think some of the bigger speeches in the second half could have been reined in a little. I understand that these are intense moments, but in the small, storefront theater, as opposed to a larger venue where the actors would be projecting to the back of the balcony, several moments threatened to overwhelm the space and, on occasion, the actors. A few key moments stayed at a constant 10 out of 10 that would have been better served by letting that energy rise and fall a little more fully.

Still, these are comparatively minor complaints. This is a barnburner of a show, and a staple of American theater for a reason. The themes of suspicion and paranoia are, sadly, evergreen. The creeping dread of watching neighbor turn on neighbor and the realization that logic will not, cannot work to save you is on full display here. Particularly in the displaying how easy it is for petty, mundane complaints to metastasize into something sinister, this production is highly entertaining.

Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented May 11 to June 11 by Invictus Theatre at 1106 W. Thorndale, Chicago.

Tickets are are available here.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.com.