Plays do not have to be performed to be enjoyed, as any reading of Shakespear proves. They all contain a certain literary quality that can still flow as readers become absorbed into the words. Similar to listening to any great work of music, where just the mere act of listening can transport the listener into another realm of existence. Many plays, like those of Shakespeare, tend to poke fun at recent or historic events. How many plays, one wonders, can be written about our current times.
Early on a wet spring morning in 1952, Arthur Miller maneuvered his green Studebaker into Elia Kazan’s Connecticut driveway. The ignition off, he sat for a few minutes quietly, battling a sense of dread. Kazan had phoned several times to arrange the meeting. He and Miller were neighbors in the country and best friends; they shared upbringings, tastes, and convictions. In five years, they seemed together to have reconfigured the American theatrical landscape. Their collaborations on All My Sons and Death of a Salesman had secured two Tonys for Kazan and a Pulitzer for Miller, who believed his friend possessed of a genius shared by no other director.
Miller suspected that he knew the reason for his summons. In the mid-1930s, Kazan had briefly been a member of the Communist Party. When subpoenaed months earlier by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he had refused to identify his fellow travelers. He had since found himself frozen out of Hollywood offices, warned that he would never again work in film. Miller presumed that Kazan had resolved to name names, a decision Miller thought disastrous, as he told him when the two finally headed out for a walk that dim April morning. Kazan explained that he had no alternative. Were he to fail to come clean, his artistic life in America was finished. He would be denied a passport to work abroad. Neither for his own sake nor that of his children could he afford to be blacklisted. Someone else would mention the same insignificant names even if he did not. He had moreover no sympathy for communism. Why, then, should he withhold his testimony?
Gently Miller made clear that he thought Kazan naive. He was about to humiliate himself and sacrifice others to a band of cynical fanatics who comported themselves like mobsters but lacked the moral code even of that trade. The panic would subside, Miller insisted. But Kazan acted now from fear rather than conviction. He was morally in the wrong. Miller felt. He elected not to mention something of which Kazan was unaware at the time: though never a party member, Miller too had attended meetings. He had applied for a study course in Marxism. Inside his disapproval was a kernel of fear. He could imagine himself among Kazan’s victims. The two walked back to the house in silence.
The conversation lasted less than an hour. As Miller climbed back into the Studebaker, Kazan’s wife, Molly, came out to say good-bye. She seemed to have gathered the walk had not been a success. Did Miller grasp how deeply Communists had penetrated unions? Did he even understand his country any longer, she demanded, motioning down the Connecticut road? Unable to so much as make eye contact, Miller found himself muttering his way through his side of the conversation. The awkward moment grew fraught when Molly asked if he was heading to his country home. Miller was, he explained, driving to Salem, Massachusetts.
“You’re not going to equate witches with this!” Molly gasped. Leaning through the Studebaker window, she reminded Miller that there had been no witches. There were undeniably Communists. He had yet to decide anything, Miller assured her. He had for some time resisted writing about Salem, unconvinced he could manage to wrap his mind around such preposterousness. He did intend at least to make an exploratory trip to the archive, however. Grimly, under a steady rain, they waved good-bye. Miller headed north to research what became The Crucible. A week later Kazan headed south to name names in Washington.
Salem was, for Miller, full of surprises. He found that an industrial town had supplanted the wooden village of his imagination. It had not yet acquired its carnivalesque atmosphere; it would be several decades before Salem appointed itself “the Witch City” or stitched flying broomsticks on its police uniforms. In 1952 no one spoke freely of the events of 260 years earlier. Miller was taken aback not only by the silence about the witchcraft epidemic, but by how much, even under a cold drizzle, he took to “morose and secret” Salem. As he left the archive one day, he found himself transfixed by an etching on Essex County courthouse wall. He understood it to be the work of a 1692 eyewitness.
The crux of the play came to him on his second afternoon in Salem, when Miller read the account in the trial papers of 41-year-old Elizabeth Proctor’s hearing. As a 19th-century chronicler remarked, in pages that Miller read in 1952, there had seldom been better acting on the boards of any theater.
The real Abigail Williams was 11 years old when she accused Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft. She had never lived with or worked for Elizabeth Proctor, whose real servant never named her. Abigail Williams may or may not even have known Elizabeth Proctor. Miller had nonetheless precisely what he needed: a motive for someone to sow holy terror, to sacrifice another, to sully an unblemished reputation with what would, at another time, have seemed a ludicrous charge. The girls launched what Miller later termed hallucinatory spitballs. Here was an illustration of how we cleanse our consciences by projecting our misdeeds onto others, here was a world upended by its own sacred beliefs, an almost indigestibly rich banquet of human psychology.
So buried had he been inside the Salem delusion that Miller was startled, on his drive home a week later, by the six o’clock news. Over the car radio he heard about Kazan’s April 10 appearance in Washington. Wincing for and ultimately furious with Kazan, he drove slowly. He was still uncertain about the theme of his play, but by the time he got out of his car in Brooklyn he knew he had committed to writing it.
Miller had complained for some time that he felt out of touch with the country, removed from the mainstream. He risked producing a work that would disappear with the headlines. Did he really mean to stake his reputation on the assertion that suspicions about Communists were unfounded, the panic wholly invented?
Indeed, Miller stated that Communists existed, and witches did not. But the paranoid leap into fantasy was identical, as was the rampaging fear at the center of both crises.
Behind every moral panic, Miller believed, stood an evil impresario, eager for his own reasons to manipulate the raw materials. When it came to making sense of Salem, he would implicate Samuel Parris, the minister who churned adolescent afflictions into the original plot against America. Miller captured the epidemic’s hysteria but indicted the wrong impresario. He ignored Thomas Putnam, the villager whose feet stick out most conspicuously from behind the Salem curtain and whose 12-year-old daughter named 62 names, accusing dozens of adults she had never met, in some cases of crimes committed before she was born.
The committee thanked Kazan for his help unmasking a plot against America. Accounts of the testimony exploded in the papers. Kazan fielded anonymous phone calls, vitriolic letters, and death threats. His secretary quit. He hired a bodyguard for his family. To his surprise, he heard nothing from his former best friend. When next Kazan and Miller crossed paths, in the lobby of Kazan’s office building, Miller pretended not to see him, a snub Kazan never forgot.
From the start Miller knew where the new work opened: a séance with Tituba, the Indian slave in the Parris household, originally prefaced Abigail’s attempt to seduce John Proctor. There was precedent for opening a tragedy with a supernatural assembly in the wilderness. And Miller was not the first to attempt to fold the witch trials into a play. Longfellow had beaten him to it by 85 years. He too had opened Giles Corey of the Salem Farms with wonder-working Tituba.
Miller would say that he thrilled to the sensuousness of the early American prose. He relaxed almost immediately into its dense, gnarled syllables. Contemporary diction seemed ill-equipped to accommodate the strains and stresses of the story; he attempted to sculpt an entirely new language, groping about for one that felt archaic yet flowed naturally, drafting most of the play in verse. At some point in 1952 he enlisted the poet Kimon Friar, then teaching at New York University, earlier the tutor and lover of James Merrill, for syntactical assistance. He worked his way steadily through the forest of material, copying out bits of testimony, fixing on plot points, drafting snatches of dialogue, trying to locate the fault lines, to connect a society in crisis with the logic behind that crisis. He collapsed individuals into each other. He discarded and invented others, permanently transforming a number of Salem afterlives. No one shape-shifted quite as dramatically as Tituba, Indian in the court papers, Black and versed in voodoo by the time Miller had finished with her. Miller invented the naked frolic in the woods, nearly impossible afterward to peel from the history.
Ultimately Miller inserted long expository passages into the play. Gristle in the soup, the bane of any high schooler, they sound suspiciously like the historical record. Here Miller performs true magic, stating in a preface that The Crucible, not unlike Stephen King's Salem's Lot, should not pass for history while stipulating that all his characters reprise their nonfictional roles.
Titles did not come easily to Miller, which is a way of saying they came too easily. A View from the Bridge was originally The Men from Under the Sea. Death of a Salesman had been The Inside of His Head. He toyed with at least 18 alternatives for the new play. Along the way he discarded The Devil’s Rendezvous and That Invisible World in favor of The Familiar Spirits. Weeks before the 1953 opening he settled finally on The Crucible, a title that appealed partly because no one seemed to know what it meant. When it came to directors, his first choice was the last person he could ask. Jed Harris was brought in, with disastrous results that manic, multiple, premiere-delaying requests for rewrites might have foretold. A calamitous dress rehearsal followed. Too late, Miller remembered the old wisdom that no one had ever managed a hit in Puritan dress.
The Crucible opened on Broadway on January 22, 1953. Expectations ran high; it had been four years since Death of a Salesman had met with near-universal acclaim. Few understood the title and even fewer seemed to appreciate the play, staged with all the dynamism, its author acknowledged, of a Dutch painting. From the back of the theater he watched in horror as the audience fell asleep.
One critic deemed The Crucible blunt, crude, inert, and overstuffed. It was dismissed as melodrama and a history lesson, more an outburst than a play, neither art nor entertainment, as mechanical, medicinal, didactic, hermetic, clumsy, creaky, icy, turgid, empty, and labored - some of which remains true.
He was correct about the sheet of ice. He had written a cold play about a bleak place in which a woman under duress apologizes, after a chilling course of events, for her frozen heart. He attempted to salvage the operation with a pared-down production, extending the initial run for several weeks. Though it won him a Tony, The Crucible proved a disappointment. Often in lofty terms, he returned over and over to the question of why he had written it, embracing and disassociating himself from the topical analogy. The Crucible had in no way been all about red scares, Miller insisted in 1958. It was about the conflict between a man’s idea of himself and what happens when he outsources his conscience, an explanation that might suggest it was largely a play about Kazan.
It would be some time before The Crucible escaped the midday sun of McCarthyism, allowing its audience to sink into the cushioned comfort of allegory. It would be years, too, before Miller spoke about the nonallegorical anguish at the center of the play.
In part he had the colossal success of Death of a Salesman to blame. As Kazan saw it, that work had transformed its author into the unlikeliest of breeds: the swashbuckling public intellectual. Suddenly Miller was dining with Thomas Mann and affecting a pipe. His very carriage changed. The celebrity went to his head, and inevitably the celebrity went to Hollywood, where in January 1951, between takes on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, Kazan introduced him to a contract player with a bit part in a comedy. The contract player was 24 but looked younger. As Miller shook her hand a bolt of electricity shot through his body. The actress, with whom Kazan began an affair days later, was Marilyn Monroe.
The project for which he had flown to California came apart, but the spell refused to lift. Though Miller and Monroe exchanged only occasional notes over the next years, she had colonized his imagination. He thought of her day and night. It was in this technically innocent open parenthesis that Miller wrote The Crucible.
Despite the lukewarm Broadway reception and without its American baggage, The Crucible traveled comfortably throughout Europe. Salem witchcraft struck a particular chord with the play’s Belgian director, who thought back to the dark days of the Spanish Inquisition. He hoped that Miller might attend the March 1954 Brussels premiere. Only after he had accepted the invitation did Miller discover that his passport had expired. The State Department elected not to renew it, refunding Miller’s nine-dollar application fee and issuing a press release declaring his presence abroad antithetical to United States interests.
Miller issued a statement of his own. While he did not support communism, he did consider himself something of an expert on witch hunts. And he knew that in the face of delusion, truth could expect to come in for a beating until the hysteria had passed, by which time there was plenty of shame and discomfort to go around. With his plays he wagered that he had made more European friends for American culture than had the State Department, which, he added, was not difficult. Certainly, he had made fewer enemies. It was easier to sound flippant given prior brushes with the government. All My Sons had earlier been removed from the army’s repertoire, deemed bad for morale. Salesman too had been censored. Still, there was a familiar surreality to the next years. Miller felt as if he were up against the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland.
A few years later, The Crucible had been translated into French and reworked for the screen with a script by Jean-Paul Sartre. Miller resigned himself to the film. On the one hand, no American studio would touch The Crucible at the time. On the other, he loathed the script, into which Sartre had ladled a full helping of Marxism.
When the film was released in America, The Crucible had returned to the New York stage in an off-Broadway production. Miller could feel the 1958 audience warming to the work as the 1953 audience could not.
Could it all happen again, he wondered aloud, 49 years before Democratic Party officials were said to be running a child sex ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor? Miller believed it could, which was the point. The “lobal cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles of which Marjorie Taylor Greene warned sounds eerily like the local cabal of Satan-worshipping Puritans. By 1958, The Crucible was on its way into the canon, to haunt generations of schoolchildren and to subsume, as neatly as any work of art this side of All the King’s Men ever has, the history on which it is based.
In addition to all else, the play offers something so simple it is easy to forget it is there: an explanation for the suffocation of reason and for the actual greatest witch hunt in American history. Generations of us have been force-fed the play, holding its own behind Shakespeare in terms of popularity in high school, where it arguably belongs.
Miller would say he could always tell when a dictator had just been deposed or a coup threatened, as a Crucible production reliably followed.
The delusional forces remain offstage but within earshot: we hear about witch hunts whenever anyone turns on a TV. The history, too, slides about in the background.
Miller never got over The Crucible’s disastrous opening, never forgot the glacial chill in the theater or the snubs in the Martin Beck lobby. He watched dotingly as his problem child grew up to become his most popular play. He could sound like a bit of a blowhard on its account. He was prouder of The Crucible than of anything else he had written. It had handsomely answered its critics.
Miller explained in any number of ways his reasons for writing it. He had hoped to wake a country that had drifted asleep when democracy stood in peril. He had been struggling for sanity. In the thick of an ideological war, America had drifted into the hands of a ministry of free-floating apprehension. He came to understand the deep pleasure to be found in jumping from logical bridges, the willful weaponization of untruths, the love of delusion. By comparison, he observed, the search for evidence is a deadly bore.
In his late eighties he told an interviewer that the lines he heard prosecutors speak at the McCarthy hearings sounded precisely like what he had read of Salem: “At first it was simply unbelievable, but I went back into history and there it was. It was mind-boggling that the same material could have arisen some three hundred years later.” It remains mind-boggling today that pillars of society chose to handcuff themselves to delusion. Miller at one point affixed a warning to his play: “And when the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.”
By no means a subtle piece of work, The Crucible has at once survived and anticipated the headlines. Politics supply its muscle and sinew. But its beating heart is the predicament of contending with a different order of invisible world. Whether it slips past us or not, the molten Monroe center has kept the play vital and unsettling. Creaky, sententious, sophistic, indigestible though it may feel, The Crucible promises to remain with us in one form or another so long as “hallucinatory spitballs” fly.
“I’m not really a moralist,” Arthur Miller wrote in his last decade. “I just make the assumption that certain things we do lead to catastrophe.”
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