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THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR...

Although written a half century ago in response to a repressive time in American history, The Crucible—back on Broadway in a revival starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney—presents considerable evidence that Arthur Miller's powerful drama has relevance for the ages

by Mervyn Rothstein

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Liam Newson and Laura Linney star in Arthur Miller's The Crucible
FIROOZ ZAHEDI

Arthur Miller, 86 years old last October, is speaking about The Crucible, his classic play about the witchcraft trials in 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts.
"The play is about hysteria, public mass hysteria, and the attempts by certain interested parties to exploit that hysteria for their own profit," says the renowned playwright, the recipient in November 2001 of the National Book Foundation's medal for distinguished contribution to American literature. "The threat of this kind of hysteria is never really gone. It's with us always."
Now The Crucible is back on Broadway at the Virginia Theatre, nearly 50 years after winning the Tony Award in 1953 as the best play of the season. The production stars Liam Neeson and Laura Linney and is directed by Sir Richard Eyre.
The Crucible, says the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Death of a Salesman and A View From the Bridge, became his most frequently produced play, both abroad and at home. It was written in a time of hysteria, of witch hunting by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities against Communists and suspected Communists, a time of blacklisting, ruined lives, naming names and guilt by association. 
Miller, as he wrote in his 1987 autobiography Timebends, was so upset by what he saw happening in America that he wanted to create a play that would be "a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the heart" and "penetrate to the center of this miasma." He strongly feared, he wrote, that the crisis might worsen to the point that "we could no longer be a democracy, a system that requires a certain basic trust in order to exist."
"There were moments in those days," the playwright says now, "when there was"
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See THE ONLY THING . . ., page 50

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