The Crucible,'' written in 1953 by Arthur Miller, is produced constantly all over the world. On Thursday the play, which links the Salem witch trials of the 1690's to McCarthyism in the 1950's, will open at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, where Arvin Brown will direct a cast that includes John Braden, Charles Cioffi, Frank Converse and Virginia Downing. In March the Roundabout Theater in New York will also stage a production, directed by Gerald Freedman. In this essay the playwright discusses the origin and nature of his work.
I did not write ''The Crucible'' simply to propagandize against McCarthyism, although if justification were needed that would have been enough. There was something else involved. I'll try to explain.
A writer friend was recently telling me about a Moscow theater producer who is interested in putting on a play about the Vietnam War. Why Vietnam? It turns out that what he would really like to illuminate is the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, but with feelings about Afghanistan still running so high he felt he needed a metaphor that would go to the dilemmas underlying such a war rather than attempting an outright confrontation with the thickets of feeling surrounding Afghanistan itself.
That approach reminded me of my decision to write about the 1692 Salem witch trials rather than trying to take on Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts directly. In the early 50's McCarthyism, so-called, began as a conservative Republican cavalry charge that in the name of anti-Communism helped scatter the left-liberal coalitions of Democrats and union people who had held together the only recently faded New Deal. But this was no ordinary political campaign. This time the enemy was not merely ''The Democrat Party,'' as McCarthy sneeringly renamed it, but the hidden foreign plot which, naively but often knowingly, it shielded. Thus a certain sublime gloss - national security - was varnished over a very traditional grab for domestic political power.
With amazing speed McCarthy was convincing a lot of not unintelligent people that the incredible was really true, and that, say, General of the Army George Catlett Marshal was a Communist sympathizer, or that Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland was a buddy of Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party. (A photo of both of them standing happily together would only much later be proved to have been a fake manufactured by Roy Cohn, McCarthy's right-hand bandido.) For a time it began to seem that Senator Joe was heading straight for the White House, the more so when the sheer incredibility of his claims appeared to be part proof that they were real; if the Communists were indeed hidden everywhere, it followed that they would certainly be found where common sense indicated they could not conceivably be.
The case being circular, it was finally all but unarguable. Worse yet, you could not rely on the too-trusting police, the naively legalistic courts or even the slow-moving F.B.I. to root out the conspiracy. As for the press, it was all but sold to Moscow, secretly, of course. Who then was absolutely reliable? McCarthy, naturally, and those who had his blessing.
This was colorful and fascinating stuff for the stage, but a play takes a year to write and months to see through production, and I could not imagine spending so much time on what seemed to me so obvious a tale. But as the anti-Communist crusade settled in, and showed signs of becoming the permanent derangement of the American psyche, a kind of mystery began to emerge from its melodramas and comedies. We were all behaving differently than we used to; we had drunk from the cup of suspicion of one another; people inevitably were afraid of too close an association with someone who might one day fall afoul of some committee. Even certain words vibrated perilously, words like organize, social, militant, movement, capitalism - it didn't do to be on too familiar terms with such language. We had entered a mysterious pall from which there seemed no exit.
Returning around that time to my alma mater, the University of Michigan, to do a story for Holiday magazine, I discovered that students were avoiding living in the co-op rooming houses because the very idea of a nonprofit organization was suspiciously pro-left. The F.B.I. was paying students at Michigan to report secretly on teachers' political remarks, and teachers to report on students.
Why was there so little real opposition to this madness? Of course there was the fear of reprisals, of losing jobs or perhaps only bad publicity, but there was also guilt, and this seemed to me the main crippler, the internalized cop.
No doubt instinctually, McCarthy and Roy Cohn were handing around full plates of guilt which were promptly licked clean by people who in one way or another had brushed the sleeve of the Communist movement in the 30's - some by joining the party or supporting one of its front organizations, a left-wing union or professional guild, or in whatever manner had at some point in their lives turned to the left. Of course such people were used to being guilty - why else would they have bothered to worry about the poor, the blacks, the lynch victims, the Spanish Republicans and so on when real Americans were only remotely aware of such inequities around them?
It was a charm, a kind of spell. McCarthy could call the Roosevelt New Deal ''20 years of treason'' with hardly a rejoinder from the vast multitude of Americans for whom New Deal measures, hardly more than a decade before, had meant the difference between living on the street or in their own homes, between hunger and real starvation. It was a sort of benighted miracle that just about anything that flew out of his mouth, no matter how outrageously and obviously idiotic, could be made to land in an audience and stir people's terrors of being taken over by Communists, their very religion in danger.
I had known the Salem story since college, over a decade earlier, but what kept assaulting my brain now was not the hunt for witches itself; it was the paralysis that had led to more than 20 public hangings of very respectable farmers by their neighbors. There was something ''wonderful'' in this spectacle, a kind of perverse, malign poetry that had simply swamped the imaginations of these people. I thought I saw something like it around me in the early 50's.
The truth is that the more I worked at this dilemma the less it had to do with Communists and McCarthy and the more it concerned something very fundamental in the human animal: the fear of the unknown, and particularly the dread of social isolation.
Political movements are always trying to position themselves as shields against the unknown - vote for me and you're safe. The difference during witch hunts is that you are being made safe from a malign, debauched, evil, irreligious, wife-swapping, deceitful, immoral, stinking conspiracy stemming from the very bowels of hell. In Wisconsin in the early 50's, a reporter went door to door asking residents if they agreed with certain propositions, 10 in number, and discovered that very few people did, and that most thought the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution, unnamed of course in the inquiry, were Communistic. To propose that we should be free to express any idea at all was frightening to a lot of people.
The Colonial government in the 1690's saw itself as protecting Christianity (while unknowingly propagating a thrilling counter-religion of Satan worship) by seizing on the ravings of a klatch of repressed pubescent girls who, fearing punishment for their implicitly sexual revolt, began convincing themselves that they had been perverted by Satan. There were economic and social pressures at work, but the nub of it all as it appeared to the locals at the moment was that the arch-fiend had been sneaked into the spotless town by an alien who, even better, was black, the Barbadian slave of the Lord's very own man, the church minister himself. Authority quickly converted the poor girls back to the true religion and made them celebrities for their agonizing bravery in pointing out likely adherents of the Devil.
But were there not really Communists, whereas there never were any witches? Of course. And there are also paranoids who are really being followed. There was a very real military face-off in the 50's between America and the Soviet Union, and we had only recently ''lost'' China, but were these grounds for blacklisting actors and writers in Hollywood, or destroying professionals in many other fields, and for turning the country into a whispering gallery? What research showed me, and what I hoped the play would show the country and the world, was the continuity through time of human delusion, and the only safeguard, fragile though it may be, against it - namely, the law and the courageous few whose sacrifice illuminates delusion.
In the 35 years since the play was written it has become my most produced work by far. I doubt a week has gone by when it has not been on some stage somewhere in the world. It seems to be produced, especially in Latin America, when a dictatorship is in the offing, or when one has just been overthrown.
There is so often a telltale social sidelight connected to its production. Years ago in South Africa, black Tituba had to be played by a white woman in blackface, but the director, Barney Simon, terrified though he was of attack, wanted the white audience to contemplate the story. Last year I happened to meet Nien Cheng, the 70-year-old author of ''Life and Death in Shanghai,'' an account of her six-year imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. Tears formed in her eyes when she shook my hand, tears as it surprisingly turned out, of gratitude.
Released from prison, she had spent months recuperating when a director friend, Huang Tsolin, invited her to see his production of ''The Crucible'' in a Shanghai theater. She said she was astounded: ''I could not believe the play was not written by a Chinese because the questions of the court were exactly the same ones the Cultural Revolutionaries had put to me!''
I saw the play in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, where John Proctor wore 17th-century Turkish pantaloons and a gorgeous wide moustache and was chased through a forest by a crowd waving scimitars. At Olivier's fabulous 1965 National Theater production, with Colin Blakely and Joyce Redman, I overheard a young woman in front of me whispering to her escort, ''Didn't this have something to do with that American Senator -what was his name?'' I have to admit that it felt marvellous that McCarthy was what's-his-name while ''The Crucible'' was ''The Crucible'' still.
Simone Signoret and Yves Montand did a stirring French film, a version of their Paris stage performance, with a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre in which the New England farmers were, inexplicably, Roman Catholic. The Long Wharf Theater in New Haven is about to open it under Arvin Brown's direction - it was Long Wharf's first production 25 years ago - and the Roundabout Theater will be doing it later this season. An HBO film of it is to be made this winter for both television and theatrical distributon. In Glasgow recently, two productions were running at the same time, one by a young Soviet company. The Schiller Theater in Berlin will have it on in a few months.
I have wondered if one of the reasons the play continues like this is its symbolic unleashing of the specter of order's fragility. When certainties evaporate with each dawn, the unknowable is always around the corner. We know how much depends on mere trust and good faith and a certain respect for the human person, and how easily breached these are. And we know as well how close to the edge we live and how weak we really are and how quickly swept by fear the mass of us can become when our panic button is pushed. It is also, I suppose, that the play reaffirms the ultimate power of courage and clarity of mind whose ultimate fruit is liberty.
