What possessed them?

Rough times have come to America. Fear and paranoia permeate the atmosphere. The knowledge that an unknowable enemy is at work, one that hates us and plots our total destruction, pervades everything we do. For some, a primitive emotion as old as mankind is reawakening, in defiance of science and modernity. It’s the inescapable sense that we have angered God by our way of life and have brought his punishment down upon our own heads.

But that’s not all. To make matters worse, at the head of the country is the shaky son of a famous father -- an untested and ungifted scion who inherited his office and imagines himself chosen to lead the battle of the Lord against the encroaching darkness.

I’m talking, of course, about America in the 1690s and about Cotton Mather, leader of First Congregational Church in Boston, who lent guidance and sanction to the Salem witch trials. Mather’s struggles, the trials and the events leading to them form the action of my new comedy, “Safe in Hell.” I chose comedy for this serious subject for the simple reason that nothing conveys human stupidity better than farce.

The witch trials constituted a turning point in American spiritual history -- in American history in general -- a moment in which the noble experiments of America and American Puritanism went off the tracks, in some ways permanently. When Mather refused to stop the deadly course of the courts at Salem, when he contradicted his conservative father’s public reservations, when he encouraged executions even as he tried to take his own fingerprints off of them, he not only disgraced himself, he betrayed the tenets of his faith and helped usher in a fear-based, uniquely bleak form of Puritanism. Gone were traces of mercy, pity and peace that marked the preaching of his elders. He replaced the sacred with the sanctimonious.

Cotton Mather was born in 1663. His father was Increase Mather, one of the great men of American Puritanism, whose life was marked by not one but two experiences of spiritual rebirth. That is, he wasn’t just born again. He was born again ... again. Increase’s mien, it was said, was so stern and terrifying that people crossed the street when they saw him so he wouldn’t look at them. Yet his preaching was plain and direct, and striking in its humanity, wisdom and independence. He decried the pursuit of profit and the obsession with fashion. He spoke with disfavor about the cheating of Indians and, at a time when most people regarded them as savages, asserted that “these same Indians would have a place in heaven at Abraham’s table.”

Cotton, who grew up in the shadow of his father, had a much different personality -- hyper-verbal, ingratiating and obsessed with creating an air of authority that, to him, did not come naturally. A born busybody, he “rebuked” his “playmates for their wicked words and ways,” when he was only 7 or 8. As a young man, he often served as his father’s secretary, and for a four-year period when his father went away to England to renew Massachusetts’ charter, he controlled the pulpit single-handedly. Interested in the occult from his early years, he gave sermons about demonology in the late 1680s that are believed by some to have helped prepare the soil for the events in Salem.

‘Spectral evidence’

The witch trials highlighted the differences between Increase and Cotton, differences I emphasize and dramatize in the play. But the differences were there, most notably surrounding the issue of “spectral evidence,” upon which the entire proceedings turned. This is the question the Salem judges grappled with: If someone has a vision or dream that a neighbor is Satan’s servant, can that dream be used as evidence against the neighbor? The question seems ridiculous to us. But for the judges, it brought up another question: Would God really let the devil confound people by assuming, in a dreamer’s mind, the shape of the righteous?

Increase rejected “spectral evidence” and viewed the events at Salem with horror and consternation. He wrote, “To take away the life of anyone, merely because a specter or devil in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them, will bring the guilt of innocent blood upon the land.” Fourteen prominent ministers in the Boston area signed Increase’s statement. Only one begged to disagree -- his son. Cotton declared that spectral evidence was a tool that God had given the judges, as one of many tools to be considered. He also went to Salem and presided over at least one of the hangings.

Thus, ambition, repression and Oedipal pressure finally boiled over. Cotton’s unconscious frustration met opportunity and created a terrible crossroads. It was Cotton’s historic moment, and given who he was, he mistook it for divine appointment. At Salem, Cotton found the opportunity to distinguish himself as a hard-liner, and, for once, to make his father look weak. For the sake of drama, I exaggerate the father-son rift, but it’s not a whole-cloth invention. By Cotton’s insistence on seeing the events as a war between humanity and hell, and by his elevating himself to God’s lieutenant in the last battle against Satan, he effectively gave himself the promotion he’d been longing for his entire formative life. He also gave himself the separation from his father that his psyche craved so badly. It’s too bad innocent people had to die for it.

To paraphrase Moss Hart, it makes you realize what a great man Sigmund Freud really was.

Cotton saw devils in dissenters, devils under the bed, preached in the months prior to Salem of constant devil attack! He used demonic language indiscriminately. Look at how he spoke of the Quakers: “The sink of all heresy, we see the vomit cast upon us by past ages by those kennels of the seducer, licked up again for a new digestion, once more exposed for the poisoning of mankind.” In the interests of dramatic and comic inevitability, I wanted to give Cotton a confrontation on stage with everything he held most vomitous.

Hence, my creation of the Rev. George Doakes, a conflation of two real-life Salem ministers: George Burroughs, who was hanged on Cotton’s direct order, and the Rev. Samuel Parris, whose daughters, Abigail and Mary, claimed to be victims of witchcraft. Doakes, more than any other character in the play, is a man for our time as well as theirs. In him, we recognize that eternal irritant, the folk minister, the goofy liberal, whose antidote to Cotton’s dark vision of the Last Judgment is a kind of equally ridiculous New Age vision of No Judgment, not ever. (Because we’re all just good people here, aren’t we?) His inability to comprehend evil as a consequential force is as limiting as Cotton’s absolutism. Which is why it’s dramatically necessary for them to confront each other at the apex of the play.

Competing forces

Today we live in a world that seems split in two. On one side is the “reality”-based world of profit, driven by technology and the unlimited pursuit of power: individual, corporate or national. The imperative has gone out of the social covenant. On the other side is a fundamentalist terror that enshrines ignorance, but is in some ways emotionally accurate in its fear of the modern world’s secular appetites -- appetites without limit and checked by absolutely nothing.

Though contemporary parallels can be found in “Safe in Hell,” I started researching and writing the play more than 10 years ago. In the process, I’ve come to understand that our vision of the Puritans -- as hatchet-faced killjoys -- is grossly inaccurate. These were a complex people. As Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson put it, in their introduction to “The Puritan Source Book”: “What we know as ‘fundamentalism’ would have been completely antithetical to them, for they never for one moment dreamed that the truth of scripture was to be maintained in spite of or against the evidences of reason, science and learning.... For the same reasons, Puritans would object strenuously to almost all recent attempts to ‘humanize’ religion, to smooth over hard doctrines, to introduce sweetness and light at the cost of hardheaded reason and invincible logic.” The Puritans were nothing if not literate, and the whole notion of faith-based believers versus the intellectual elite would have merited from Increase Mather a most terrifying glare. They were the intellectual elite.

Today I recognize the beauty and strength of the early Puritan’s dream of America, a dream of a society governed by its citizens’ unyielding commitment to conscience. Though Cotton Mather twisted our understanding of the Puritan legacy, it remains, in a sense, pure and part of our American self-image, even if we don’t know what put it there. It’s why civic betrayals and governmental lies and abuses wound us still in a way that our European counterparts might find naive.

In fact, every movement in history that made the world better was naive -- or seemed so at the time.

*

Salem by moonlight

An excerpt from “Safe in Hell” featuring a folk minister, George Doakes, and his wife.

(As moon rises. Salem. Outside Doakes sits. Mrs. Doakes enters, in a nightgown, in the moonlight, holding her head)

Mrs. Doakes: What are you doing out here?

Doakes: Nan, I -- I couldn’t sleep. I was -- frightened.

Mrs. Doakes: You! What? Why! What are you talking about?

Doakes: I wish I KNEW, dear it’s just come over me. This sudden feeling that something -- suddenly -- isn’t RIGHT. As if everything we CAME here for is about to go horribly WRONG!

(an arrow hits a tree, close to Mrs. Doakes’ head. She shrieks and jumps back. He doesn’t notice.)

The war -- what it did was terrible. To the Indians, of course. But I think that what it did to us may have been worse, somehow.

Mrs. Doakes: What are you talking about? They set fire to my entire family. They hacked men, women and children to death! They kidnapped my little brother! They scalped people that I went to school with!

Doakes: I know that. But don’t we have to look at both sides?

(a wolf, or is it? howls. Mrs. Doakes shrieks and jumps.)

Mrs. Doakes: No!? WHY! WHY do we have to look at both sides!

Doakes: Because we CAME here to build something that all of history has been waiting for -- a kingdom of LIGHT of LOVE -- of human beings equal in joy before “The GREAT GOODNESS.”

Mrs. Doakes: You mean -- GOD?

Doakes: What-ever.

Mrs. Doakes (slowly): Did you say what-EVER?

Doakes: Yes. What. “Whatever.” What we CALL Him doesn’t matter. That we KNOW Him is what matters. “Words” have divided us for thousands of years. Perhaps it’s time the “words” should go.

Mrs. Doakes (scared): What on earth are you saying! You’re starting to sound just like a -- QUAKER! What if someone should HEAR you! You could get us all driven out into the WILDERNESS! Of course, we’re already IN the WILDERNESS -- but DEEPER! DEEPER into the WILDERNESS! For God’s SAKE be QUIET! Before someone reports us!

Doakes: Before someone REPORTS us? What IS that!? See what I mean? How everything seems to be CHANGING? I have such a terrible feeling -- We don’t know who we ARE anymore. Or what we ARE has no MEANING anymore. Do you know what I’m trying to say, Nan?

Mrs. Doakes: No. I’m a PURITAN! And I DO know what it means. And you did too, once upon a time. Or have you forgotten?

*

‘Safe in Hell’

Where: South Coast Repertory, Segerstrom Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Opens Friday; Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.

Ends: May 9

Price: $27-$55

Contact: (714) 708-5555

Amy Freed is a San Francisco- based playwright. Her plays “The Beard of Avon” and “Freedomland” were commissioned and premiered at South Coast Repertory. The latter was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.