The Crucible
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In 1953, Arthur Millers play “The Crucible” ran on Broadway at the Martin Beck. Despite being a box office success and acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, it was considered second-best to his prior “Death of a Salesman.” As Brook Atkinson for the New York Times reported the day after the opening, “[T]he theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of Death of a Salesman.”
Although the events of the play are based on the events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, Miller was liberal in his fictionalization of those events. For example, many of the accusations of witchcraft in the play are driven by the affair between farmer, husband, and father John Proctor (Arthur Kennedy), and the Ministers teenage niece Abigail Williams (Madeleine Sherwood); however, in real life Williams was probably about eleven at the time of the accusations and Proctor was over sixty, which makes it most unlikely that there was ever any such relationship. Miller himself said, “The play is not reportage of any kind . [n]obody can start to write a tragedy and hope to make it reportage . what I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme.”
The “important theme” that Miller was writing about was clear to many observers in 1953 at the plays opening. It was written in response to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committees crusade against supposed communist sympathizers. Despite the obvious political criticisms contained within the play, most critics felt that “The Crucible” was “a self contained play about a terrible period in American history.”
The Crucible (The Movie)
Over twenty years after the opening of the play, the eighty-one-year-old Miller wrote the screenplay for the production of a movie version of “The Crucible.” As was the play, the movie is a fictionalized version of the events of Salem