‘Crucible’ to Open SCR’s 25th Season

A revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”--to open Sept. 9 on the South Coast Repertory Mainstage--will launch the Costa Mesa theater company’s 25th anniversary season, SCR officials said Tuesday. Martin Benson, a two-time winner of Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards, will direct the 1952 play, which explores the mass hysteria surrounding the 17th-Century Salem witch trials.

Eric Overmyer’s “In Perpetuity Throughout the Universe” will bow Sept. 23 on the SCR Second Stage. No director has been announced. Overmyer’s comedy, about an agency of fiction writers who feed on mass paranoia, premiered at Baltimore Center Stage in May and is now being staged at the Hudson Guild Theatre in New York.