Mass paranoia, fear, lies, finger pointing — Arthur Miller’s classic play “The Crucible” couldn’t be coming to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre at a more fitting time as the themes in this tale of the Salem witch trials seem just as commonplace in our own daily headlines.
We sat down with Michael Stewart Allen, who plays John Proctor and who you might remember as last season’s Macbeth; Tarah Flanagan, who plays Elizabeth Proctor; Gracyn Mix, who plays Abigail Williams; and Eric Gilde, who plays Reverend John Hale, to learn more about The Rep’s production of this sordid story.
Opening night for “The Crucible” is Friday, Oct. 28. For tickets and more information, click here.
Tell me about the role your characters play in the story what how you identify with them most.
Michael Stewart Allen: I’m playing John Proctor, and I think it’s one of the greatest parts ever written in American theater. He’s an inherently good man who has done a really bad thing and cheated on his wife. He cannot reconcile himself, the goodness in his soul, with what he’s actually done. He’s caught in this really strict Puritanical society that believes in predestination, so once he commits this sin, he feels like he’s damned. How do you find redemption in that? How do you find purpose after doing something that horrible in his mind? The part is fascinating.
As far as what I identify with, it’s his humanity, his struggle with trying to do the right thing and trying to find goodness every day, his struggle to not focus on his flaw that eats away at him. I think that’s something we can all identify with. What he does is not entirely good and he finds goodness through that, and that’s his journey in the play.
Gracyn Mix: I play Abigail Williams. She spurs on the problems in the play. Like John Proctor, I think she struggles in the Puritan society and she needs some kind of release. So she goes out into the woods with her fellow young women and they do these spells for fun, but take it sort of seriously as well, and they get caught and it gets very scary. They could be whipped, they could be hanged for this stuff. Abigail then goes into save-myself mode, but condemns a lot of people in the process.
What I relate to is that I think everybody has been in a situation where they want to get out of trouble and they lie. I certainly have. I don’t relate in how far this goes, but I can definitely relate to the circumstance, to trying to do anything to get out of it and then being caught so far down the rabbit hole that you can’t get out of it and that you say and do things you don’t want to do.
Eric Gilde: I play John Hale, who is the minister of Beverly, a community that’s far enough away to consider him an outsider to Salem. He’s called in once the rumors of witchcraft are going around to assess the situation in a doctor-like way as sort of an expert on witchcraft. He’s very much trying to bring an impartial, outside eye to it, which is a good thing in theory, but he has no idea as to the inner workings of the community — the jealousy, the relationships. In trying to use logic and scripture to get to the bottom of this, he inadvertently exacerbates the situation. As he becomes more and more aware of that, he’s increasingly ridden with guilt as he tries to find a way out.
It’s weird to say that I relate to that, but there’s this sense of trying to do a good thing, it not going quite your way and then carrying the guilt of that while trying to right the wrong you feel responsible for. That too is a fairly universal emotion.
Tarah Flanagan: I play Elizabeth Proctor, the wife of John Proctor. Elizabeth starts the play in this domestic drama of a marriage that has been damaged. She and her husband are both attempting with integrity to rebuild and everything gets turned upside down because of the accusations of witchcraft. This small domestic drama takes on these huge life and death consequences because Michael’s character is grappling with the man that he knows himself to be and the struggles he has with taking action to support that inner integrity, but the consequences for his family become life and death.
And I have to agree with Michael. Yes, her humanity is the thing I relate to. We sort of all have been saying that because Arthur Miller is such a fine playwright. Whenever you’re dealing with a play where the writing is a little subpar, you have to make all these internal justifications for why your character would say the things they’re saying. But working on this play, the thing I’m continually appreciative of is how honest the writing feels. Of course I would act in this way, of course I would say these things, it rings really true. Even if I’ve not been in her particular circumstances, I think I can relate to the fact that we’re all walking bundles of contradictions. So she has this great inner reserve of strength and fortitude, and yet lacks some basic self esteem and fails to see some of her own shortcomings. That’s something I can absolutely relate to.
So since you all first read “The Crucible” in high school or college, how would you say that your perceptions of the story and characters have changed since the first time you experienced it?
TF: I think like any great work of art, it just meets you wherever you are in life. You think, oh, this is for me. Then you come back 10 years later and think, oh, no, now this is for me. When I was young, I thought it was such an amazing story and it was so exciting, and I could identify with the girls inasmuch as I could be frustrated at the lack of agency in my own life. I thought about how thrilling it would be to have a topsy-turvy world where you might run the show for the grownups. But as someone who is in my early 40s and is married, I meet it at a very different place in a very different way.
And the idea of the condemnation of the “other” when we are afraid in our society, unfortunately we just keep running that cycle over and over again, and I’m more aware of that now than when I was 15 years old.
GM: I think if you would’ve asked me when I read it in the 10th grade what I thought it was about, I would’ve said witches. Now, I would say that it’s about love and power and a lot of family.
EG: It’s such a gift to work on a play like this in part because there are a lot of really wonderful plays out there that you can look at, work on a little bit and it’s great, but it pretty much is what it is. But the really exceptional writing by the really exceptional writers, in which I would definitely count this play and Arthur Miller, the more you work on it, the more you look at it, the deeper it seems to go. It’s really hard to find the bottom of a play like this because every word is so carefully written and every tiny relationship and moment is so carefully considered that it seems that there’s an endless amount of nuance and possibility to explore. It changes with you in a weird way so that you can come back to it and see all of these new facets to it like a really beautiful gem — depending on the light of the day, it’s going to reflect the light differently.
MSA: When I was reading it in high school, it was fascinating to me because it was set in 1692 and I was fascinated by that life and witches, so that’s what I thought it was about. Now looking at it, I realize Arthur Miller has done this amazing thing by taking really modern humanity and conflicts and put them in a world where we can associate easier. We as an audience and we as a cast are able to delve into this subject matter with a level of impunity, and therefore we can dig deeper and sort of expose more of it than a play set in a modern era. I think that’s why it’s so brilliant and why he’s such a good writer.
You’ve mentioned that this is one of those shows that feels relevant even today. What themes have you seen in this play that directly parallel the cultural climate we’re in right now?
MSA: There are so many times my character talks about pretense. He has this line: “Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our pretense is ripped away.” There’s this idea in the media of two candidates running for office and they’re both accusing each other of being the biggest liar ever. That idea of pretense is just vibrating in the world right now. On the internet all you have to do is accuse somebody and then it explodes into this great media frenzy. Then we have John Proctor screaming at Reverend Hale, ‘Are the accusers always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God’s fingers?” I think that line has particular relevance today. In this day and age, we have to remember that the defendant is innocent until proven guilty, yet is so often tried in the media.
EG: There are so many human things that this play taps into and one of them is that in a time of uncertainty and fear, people are very quick to condemn other people as the cause of it. They’re very quick to form groups where past wrongs perceived by others become exploited and threaded into the larger problem. There’s a paranoia that feeds on itself when there’s a lot of uncertainty and it seems like nationally, globally there’s a lot of fear about what way the country is headed, what way a person’s given state or community are going into.When you feel like the firmness of the ground beneath you is starting to give way for whatever reason, you want to find the cause. And when people are more nervous, they’re more willing to take a bit of a leap to arrive at something that they can direct their fear and uncertainty and anger at.
TF: There’s something about when people are frightened and divided into camps and are pointing at the “other,” they start to adopt the rhetoric of “if you’re not with us, then you are against us.” Then nobody can feel safe questioning the accuser or methods or motivations without being condemned as in the other camp or part of the problem. That’s very much alive in this play and I feel like that rhetoric is very much alive today in media and politics when people are really frightened and met with the disallowing of a question that some perceive to be a justified condemnation of that person.
Women are at the heart of this play as both targets and accusers. So in our society where feminism is more regularly part of the vernacular, has that affected how you see the story at all?
GM: This is something we’ve talked about in rehearsal. Back then, women had to sit up very straight and weren’t allowed to speak unless spoken to. Obviously times have changed, but I grew up in the South and there are still many cultural differences between the way boys and girls behave and the ways they act out. This play very much parallels that, just in extremes. And like Michael said earlier, we delve into this world to illuminate the world we’re actually in.
My character is not targeted by the witch trials, but she is targeted by the culture, and so that’s where all this pent-up stuff comes from. It does relate to today in a way, but it also makes me feel incredibly lucky to be here now.
TF: I think I would echo that. There are certain lines where I have to just take a deep breath and remember that she’s a different person in a different circumstance before I say it. So yes, I’m incredibly grateful that we know more about human psychology and things like postpartum depression and how thankful I am that I don’t have to keep my eyes cast down and that I can feel very free to hold my head up in society. I’m very, very grateful for progress… but I don’t think we’ve evolved past the dynamic of looking to who’s an easy target and women are somehow still more easy to vilify and target.
What are the main ideas and lessons you would hope audience members go home with after the show?
MSA: Personal responsibility is something that really comes to mind for me. Every single one of our characters has a point in the play where they have to face up to things they’ve said or done. They have to either choose to acknowledge them and accept them and deal with the consequences created by them, or they can go the other path and choose to deny that personal responsibility. That’s a huge thing in the play for my character and for all of us — it’s how you deal with that choice that really shapes the world where you live. I think that’s one of the things Miller’s trying to get out of the play, too. It’s the choices you make that form your path and affect the paths of those around you. So I would hope people go home thinking about how they live their lives and how they deal with the choices they make.
EG: There’s a lot to be said in this play about standing up for what is right. There are moments in the play where characters are faced with these really scary decisions, like a fork in the road where both options might seem bad, but one might be easier while one has a rightness to it. I think that there’s a lot of outside pressure to conform to a way of thinking. In different ways, characters are urged to fall in line, and I think a lot of what Miller is saying is that even if it requires great sacrifice, the right thing to do is still the right thing to do. It’s a cowardly thing and an almost wholly improper thing to go against what you know to be true.
TF: Whenever we are watching a play or a movie, we want to identify with the hero because we know that we are all endeavoring to proceed with integrity — there are very few mustache-twirling villains who know that they are mustache-twirling villains. But Arthur Miller doesn’t let anybody off the hook. We are all culpable, we are all responsible, we all make this society, we are all flawed. It is essential that you face the flaw in yourself in order to take that responsibility for yourself and therefore for your society. I hope in this production that the presentation is not such that we can discount any of the characters and say “that’s not me, that’s not me,” but that we have to see ourselves in all of them.
GM: So you’ve got this fairly unreliable source, this hysteria breaking out among young girls, and then these experts who come and confirm this hysteria, and they become a part of is just as much. Having doubts and questioning when these big trends happen and people are freaking about, you have to be aware of people you can trust to still have healthy questioning, but also do it for yourself.
EG: And this is not really a history lesson play, it’s all of these people wrestling with their lives and their relationships. For it to just be this straightforward, John-Proctor-is-the-hero story simplifies things in a way that I don’t think Miller has very much interest in. If people are off the hook or have that mustache-twirling in them, that’s pretty boring — there’s nothing to learn. John Proctor is this figure who is very heroic, but has a stained past. Danforth, the deputy governor, has this mighty presence and makes questionable decisions, but you see his side of things as well, and that’s what makes really interesting theater. All of these people are trying to do the right thing and they all have sound reasoning for the things they’re doing, but there are lots of ideas of what the right thing is. What happens when they collide is so wonderful to experience for an actor and hopefully for an audience as well.