STAGE REVIEW / OPEN FESTIVAL : LATC’s ‘Crucible’: Scalding Vision of Ruin

Don’t let anyone tell you that a play as long and complex as Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” can’t be undermined. It can. It’s easy. What’s not easy is to make this extraordinarily potent piece of work hit you like a blast from hell’s own furnace.

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa presented a spectacularly lucid and powerful “Crucible” in 1988, faithful to its 17th-Century setting. On Tuesday the Los Angeles Theatre Center opened an ageless but contemporized “Crucible,” staged by LATC Artistic Director Bill Bushnell, that has the virtue of being so starkly different from the one at South Coast that it repudiates comparison and emerges very strongly as its own reward.

Miller placed his thinly disguised parable for the witch hunts of the infamous McCarthy era in the 1692 Salem, Mass., of real witch hunts and Puritanical brimstone.

At LATC, set designer D Martyn Bookwalter has created a tenebrous abstract jungle of reedy poles that extend the full height of the stage, with a central massive stairway leading to a platform 20 feet above. Bookwalter’s lighting makes this place a dungeon of the spirit as much as a real dungeon; a forest where the children do their devil dances and adults misplace their judgment--and a maze in which everyone is trapped.

It’s a startling image, accompanied by an icily pernicious sound and musical score (Jon Gottlieb is credited with sound design, but no one with composition) that establishes an unsalubrious tone right from the start.

Bushnell has his actors mill around the stage informally before the lights go down, a conceit oddly out of step with what follows, which, amazingly, fails to detract from it. More interesting by half is his decision to let his offstage characters lurk in the shadows, peep through the poles and eavesdrop on the conversations on stage. It’s peering and listening that impart a subliminal pervasion of evil.

Such atmospheric pressure is not to be underestimated. It creates context. And even though Bushnell has taken care to leave any recognizable period out of it (Timian Alsaker’s costumes range from 17th and 20th Century to no century at all), the people in this production are flintier and grungier than in most--as if the unresponsiveness of the land itself dictates an absence of charity.

In this austerity, events unfold, not always perfectly, but inexorably as ever, with the sanity and rectitude of John Proctor (David Selby) and his wife Elizabeth (Ann Hearn), the good-humored cleverness of Giles Corey (Tom Rosqui) and the wisdom of Rebecca Nurse (Beatrice Manley) unable to stave off the tidal wave of self-righteousness that eventually engulfs them.

We see the conniving Abigail (Karole Lynn Foreman) brainwash her girlfriends and exploit the contagion of terror and vengefulness that has gripped this town, whipped to a frenzy by the moral fury of Deputy Gov. Danforth (Philip Baker Hall) and the cooler indignation of Judge Hathorne (a usually male role played here by a woman, Anne Gee Byrd).

The weaker the case gets the more intractable and insatiable for blood Danforth and Hathorne seem to grow, even in the damning light of the moral collapse of the Rev. John Hale (Gregory Wagrowski), sickened at last by so much misplaced hate.

Selby is unforgettable as Proctor, a tall oak of a man felled and sullied by his confession and public humiliation. He seems almost Christlike in the final scenes, though not pointedly so. All of Bushnell’s condemned appear to have been cast in a prison without water or other means of maintaining a shred of dignity. Their physical ruin is a manifestation of their mental one, while the Danforths and the Hathornes, in black cloaks swoop around them like vampires.

Foreman’s Abigail is the weakest link here, brought down by her insistence on playing the role as pure evil, no nuances. There is nothing of the dissembler in her. Baker Hall’s Danforth is also impaired, this time by personal mannerisms (a habit of jutting out the lower jaw) that make him seem almost maniacal and therefore less rational and less chilling.

But these are generally minor quibbles in a production that builds tremendous momentum despite the play’s length (it clocks in at three hours). Wagrowski is superb as the crumbling Hale; Manley is a rock as the compassionate Rebecca; Hearn is unflagging in the face of disaster; Barry Michlin is a craven and mewling Rev. Parris; and Barbara Tarbuck strong and clear as Ann Putnam and Martha Corey.

But this is an ensemble production in the best sense, and Bushnell, in what may be his finest directorial effort to date, has made it a swirling, majestic, haunting descent into festering hell.

At 514 S. Spring St., Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2. Ends Oct. 13. $22-$27; (213) 627-5599.

‘THE CRUCIBLE’

Arthur Miller’s play presented by the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Producer Diane White. Director Bill Bushnell. Set and lighting D Martyn Bookwalter. Costumes Timian Alsaker. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Choreography Rene Olivas Gubernick. Hair and make-up Sugano. Assistant directors Danny Lewin, Maria Mileaf. Stage manager Nancy Ann Adler. Cast Ilsa Anna, Jennifer Bullock, Anne Gee Byrd,Karole Lynn Foreman, Heather Graham, Philip Baker Hall, Ann Hearn, Maury Hillstrom, William Dennis Hunt, Page Leong, Beatrice Manley, Mya Maury, Barry Michlin, Fred Pinkard, Valente Rodriguez, Tom Rosqui, David Selby, Kevin Symons, Barbara Tarbuck, Gregory Wagrowski.