The Theater: New Plays in Manhattan, Feb. 2, 1953

The Crucible (by Arthur Miller) shows more fieriness of purpose than of vision. The author of Death of a Salesman has turned back to 1692 and the Salem witchcraft trials, clearly gripped by their hideous drama, clearly haunted by a conviction of their relevance today. He has watched, across the centuries, the hallucinations of children and the hearsay of grownups swell to an epidemic of accusations and arrests, confessions and hangings. In that unhappy time, any human doubt or protest was called the work of the devil, and the one way to avoid punishment lay in confession of guilt. In the foreground of this Bay Colony drama stands a young wife accused of witchcraft by a slut with whom her husband has sinned, with the husband, at the end, going forth to die.

As a demonstration of how much deviltry can go into the fighting of devils, The Crucible is often grimly instructive. Many of its scenes have real theatrical power. The play at its best is hard-hitting sociological melodrama, though even here it would gain from fewer and more sharply aimed blows. And helped by performances from Arthur Kennedy, Walter Hampden, Beatrice Straight, E. G. Marshall and others, Jed Harris has staged the play with consistent though conventional vigor.

At more ambitious levels, The Crucible falls short, for one thing because it is much more interested in manifestations than motives, more preoccupied with the how of Salem than the why. It is what the story stresses, more than the story itself, that reveals its bifocal nature, its linking of "witch-hunting" past & present, its absorption with parallels—despite the axiom that parallel lines never meet. Moral indignation rather than insight has combed over the facts; and in the end The Crucible not only omits something from its picture of Salem, but takes the life out of its inhabitants. The psychological tragedy of fierce Calvinist repression that erupted in the hysterical visions of young girls, and exploded in the hysterical reactions of their elders, is badly slighted in The Crucible; through blurring what is the real point of Salem, Miller makes mere wraiths and mouthpieces of his characters. The play is curiously unmoving; while its foreground story is even without sociological relevancy. Turning on a slut's purely malicious lie, it is a kind of primitive Children's Hour inlaid into the larger picture.

Where a work of art seems to operate at several levels, The Crucible seems made in several segments. It is in part a documentary (based, with some juggling, on 17th century facts), in part a parable with a 20th century application, in part a forthright melodrama. None of these constitutes a high form of art, and Miller, in binding them together, has provided force, but not artistic heightening. The material seems not there for the sake of the play, but the play for the sake of the material.