Elizabeth Teeter, Saoirse Ronan and Tavi Gevinson in a scene from “The Crucible.” PHOTOS BY JAN VERSWEYVELD
By Orla O’Sullivan
Now might not be the time to admit that I cannot remember the music from the “The Crucible.” The original score for this Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play is by none other than Philip Glass, one of the most distinctive composers of the last 100 years. The minimalist Glass this month received the Drama Desk’s annual award for outstanding music in a play.
Readers who get to see “The Crucible” before the run ends on July 17, cannot fail to notice the set, however. This from the first moment, as the scene opens on schoolgirls in uniform angelically singing a hymn. The curtain comes down and it re-opens on what appears to be a corpse.
This foreboding lead into the retelling of the Salem Witch Trials story the late 17th century, which served for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miller as an allegory for the communist witch-hunt of the post-war years, is one of the more dramatic moments in the two hours and 45 minutes.
Despite a strong cast – with heavy Irish representation in Saoirse Ronan, Ciarán Hinds and Jim Norton – there is a certain inevitability to the fate of the accused witches that robs the play of its potential for drama. Are we too familiar with tales of “witches” being given the proverbial “fair trial and then hung” or is the want in director Ivo Van Hove, who previously did Miller’s “A View From The Bridge” on Broadway?
A bedazzling set with levitating bodies, hurling objects, video projections, a storm and a cameo by an apparent wolf did not make up for the lack of suspense in the story. And the ambiguous placement in time, with colonial bearded men alongside relatively contemporary schoolgirls, did not add anything.
The catalyst to it all is Ronan’s character Abigail, spurned and embittered after an affair with a married man outside the village, John Proctor (Ben Whishaw). She gathers her teenage peers in the forest at night to invoke Satan against John’s wife, Elizabeth (Sophie Okonedo). These amateur sorcerers are spotted by Abigail’s uncle, the local reverend, Samuel Parris (Jason Butler Harner).
To deflect attention from themselves, the girls, browbeaten by Abigail, accuse upstanding local women of being witches.
The accusation comes at a time when local children are mysteriously falling ill (including the reverend’s daughter) and dying (the wife of a prominent farmer had seven still-born).
The mob has someone to blame and individual agents various things to gain: (status for the reverend, vengeance for Abigail, and more farmland for farmers who survive).
“A person is either with us or he must be against us!” as Hinds says in his prosecutor’s role. Though he is less accurate in his assertion, evoking the play’s title: “We burn a hot fire here, it melts down all concealment.”
One of the best scenes, featuring the play’s best characters, is a kind of warped Mr. And Mrs. TV-type moment between the Proctors. Each is asked separately about the husband’s alleged affair with Abigail and has to walk a tightrope between discrediting Abigail and condemning Proctor as a lecher.
For Ronan, fresh from her Oscar-nominated performance in “Brooklyn,” which was a study in subtlety, Abigail seems a limited role: that of a monotone mini-dictator.
Hinds’s imperious prosecutor is a study in contrasts from the slovenly, amiable drifter he played in “The Night Alive.”
In that Conor McPherson play, which last brought Hinds to the New York stage, he played opposite Norton, the veteran Dublin actor who is also in “The Crucible.” Norton plays Giles, a cranky but endearing farmer who remains fast friends with the neighbor he has sued multiple times (Proctor) and who unwittingly has his wife branded a witch by innocently questioning the church authorities on her disturbing practice of reading books.
Among them all, Okonedo – who some will know from her Tony-winning 2014 performance in “A Raisin In the Sun” – steals the show.
“The Crucible” by Arthur Miller, directed by Ivo Van Hove, runs until July 17 at the Walter Kerr Theatre (219 West 48th Street). The cast features Saoirse Ronan, Ciarán Hinds and Jim Norton. Tickets from www.thecrucibleonbroadway.com/
