A Shattering ‘Crucible’ for Our Times

As high-school drama clubs and community theaters well know, it is hard to go wrong with “The Crucible.” What has been easy to forget through the earnest decades, however, is how shattering Arthur Miller’s 1953 witch-hunt parable can be when gifted professionals get it right.

And do they ever now. Richard Eyre’s production, which opened Thursday night at the Virginia Theatre with Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Brian Murray and a big, consummate ensemble, is both massive and humane, as much a chiseled monument as a gut-bucket suspense story. How unexpectedly subtle it is--Miller’s weighty metaphor about witch trials in 17th century Salem and the state-sanctioned hunts for Communists in the 1950s. How firmly, yet how gracefully, his sturdy words and warnings still hold the stage.

Press columns are sure to be filled with revelations about the familiar drama’s resonant timeliness, about yet another world ripe for righteous hysteria, with vanishing lines between church and state, with orders for unimpeachable tribunals to rid the world of, yes, “evil,” and with the temptation to cry “terrorist” as promiscuously as the Salem citizens cried “witch” and Joe McCarthy cried “Commie.”

If all this sounds preachy and theoretical, forget you read it. The play that came up sixth on the Royal National Theatre’s millennial survey of 100 important plays (Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” was first) is the visceral, zonking, theatrical equivalent of a gripping page-turner.

Eyre, who ran London’s National Theatre during some of its headier recent years, clearly cherishes the detailed intimacies as much as the big-picture moral context. Tim Hatley’s settings help us understand the raw, hard life in the Massachusetts wilderness, 1692. A huge, sobering wall of window panes descends between scenes, a low-tech surveillance symbol for societies that devalue privacy. Hatley’s costumes for the good people of Salem are boxy and shapeless, although Eyre warms things up for a moment by having Neeson’s John Proctor peel off his big old farmer shirt for a wash before dinner.

Proctor, of course, is the uneasy hero of the drama, an ordinary man whose moment of weakness with a teenage housekeeper, the manipulative and pretty Abigail Williams, leads to public denunciations of lechery and the mob rule that condemns his wife, Mary (Linney), as a witch. Neeson, unforgettable on Broadway in “Anna Christie” and an unconventional Oscar Wilde in “Judas Kiss,” manages to be both lug and hunk, an unpretentious laborer with a nobility streak and a voice that seems to growl melodically through the tunnels and caverns of his conspicuously formidable being.

Linney, who was a New York theater treasure long before Hollywood found her, finds the flinty heat within the disappointed wife’s wary restraint, which means she is more than just a scold before she gets to turn transcendent with such dignity and heart.

Although Eyre has Abigail talk with something curiously like an Irish accent--perhaps an English signal of class struggle?--Angela Bettis is persuasive as the needy young woman with the tenacity and hunger to stick to her increasingly outlandish and deadly devices. Murray, as Deputy Governor Danforth, does not even enter until midway through the three-hour evening, but his delicious unctuousness takes its rightful place in the self-justifying proceedings.

The populous production, which lists almost as many producers as actors, includes Tom Aldredge as an achingly irascible, litigious Giles Corey, and Helen Stenborg as the saintly but earthy Rebecca Nurse. John Benjamin Hickey makes the Rev. Hale’s moral flip-flops seem as passionate as they are confused, while Christopher Evan Welch’s greedy Rev. Parris is so emotionally naked that he cannot bother to hide his violent streak.

Eyre has Parris slap the face of Tituba (Patrice Johnson), the slave he brought back from Barbados. The literal stroke makes sure we don’t forget to add slavery and non-Christian, Afro-Caribbean religion to the impact of the night Tituba and the town’s girls went to the forest to dance naked and conjure up the dead. When Rebecca’s husband reports her to the church for reading books, we can add society’s fear of women who think for themselves. And, always, there is the allure of other people’s property to make some people care too much about seeing their neighbors hang.

As the naming and blaming get out of hand, Danforth is moved to remind the citizens, “We no longer live in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.” Politicians and clergy stress, “These are new times,” by which they mean that old laws are abandoned in pursuit of national security.

Miller wrote this 50 years ago. And I’m bewitched.

“The Crucible,” Virginia Theatre, 245 W. 52nd St., New York. (800) 432-7250.

Linda Winer is chief theater critic for Newsday, a Tribune company.