THE CRUCIBLE

While theater is an art form we value and cherish, Broadway itself remains a commercial business that is dependent on ticket sales and marketing to survive. And most playwrights, big or small, are often under pressure to soften their vision to fit that reality. Some certainly do, but there are those like Arthur Miller who never could.

Miller with Charlie Rose: “I personally think that what the big ones have in common is a fierce moral sensibility which is unquenchable, and that they are all burning with some anger at the way the world is. The littler ones have made a peace with it, and the bigger ones can't make any peace.”

And in the 1950s America itself found very little peace as Communist fears were reaching a feverish pitch as the Red Scare was sweeping the country. But communism’s foothold in American society and the resistance to it went back much further. The mass unemployment and financial ruin of the Great Depression helped the American Communist Party begin to gather a following. On the surface, the party championed noble causes like fighting fascism, defending organized labor, and advocating for civil rights, which attracted many well-meaning Americans seeking racial equality and economic relief. But beneath that compassionate exterior was a rigid ideology hostile to American self-governance. Much of the party's leadership took its cues directly from the Soviet Union, with some members even engaging in actual espionage.

So in 1938, Congress created the House Un-American Activities Committee, better known as HUAC, to investigate alleged troublemakers and conspiracies. After World War II, anti-communism moved to the center of American politics as the alliance between America and the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War began. Then Russia developed an atomic bomb. Communist governments took power across Eastern Europe and China. The Korean War began in 1950. And that same year Senator Joseph McCarthy burst onto the national stage with claims of communists infiltrating the American goverment. And then came his infamous speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention:

“One communist on the faculty of one university is one communist too many...and even, even if there were only one communist in the State Department, even if there are one communist in the State Department, that would still be one communist too many.”

His rhetoric only intensified once he was re-elected and began holding his own Senate hearings to root out communism. (There was actually a Broadway musical called Senator Joe about him and his liver among other things that I covered in Season 2, so check that out if you haven't already.) But McCarthyism, as it came to be known, wasn't confined to Washington. Across the country, labor unions and civil rights organizations felt the heat. Black artists and activists, who challenged the status quo, often found themselves suspected of communist sympathies as well.

Meanwhile, Hollywood became one of HUAC's most visible targets, holding hearings into alleged communist ties within the movie industry. But a group of screenwriters and directors refused to answer questions about their political affiliations, and became known as the Hollywood Ten. They were convicted of contempt of Congress and spent six months in prison, and once they got out, no one would hire them. In fact, blacklisting had become a powerful force throughout the entertainment industry, as HUAC investigated television, radio, and Broadway as well. Actors like Paul Robeson found themselves in the crosshairs of the committee because of their political associations and beliefs:

Robeson Testimony (1956)

HUAC: Are you now a member of the Communist Party?

Robeson: Oh, please. Please, please.

HUAC: Please answer, will you Mr. Robeson?

Robeson: What is the Communist Party? What do you mean by that?

HUAC: Are you now a member of the Communist--

Robeson: Would you like to come to the ballot box when I vote and take out the ballot and see.

HUAC: Mr. Chairman, I respectfully suggest that the witness be directed to answer the question.

HUAC: You are directed to answer the question.

Robeson: I invoke the Fifth Amendment and forget it!

Some like Robeson had their passports revoked, while other notable figures like actress Stella Adler and composer Leonard Bernstein faced lengthy investigations from HUAC and the FBI. But unlike the Hollywood guilds that buckled under political pressure, Actors' Equity Association stood firm. In 1951, they passed a strict resolution that explicitly condemned blacklisting, meant to keep its members from being barred from the stage simply due to political beliefs. However, informal or whisper campaigns were still waged against some individuals. Casting agents, producers, and directors could simply say someone wasn’t "right for the part" or that the production was “going in a different direction." Unless it was stated explicitly, then it was virtually impossible for Equity to distinguish political discrimination from a standard creative rejection.

One of the most tragic examples of this was Philip Loeb, a highly respected stage actor and a prominent Actors’ Equity board member. After being named in a right-wing pamphlet called Red Channels, and despite his fervent denials of ever being associated or sympathizing with the Communist Party, Loeb was blacklisted from television work and by 1953 theater casting offices stopped calling as well. Even producers, who genuinely liked him, quietly admitted that having his name on a marquee would scare off the conservative theater groups and private investors needed to fund new shows. So after two years of being unemployable, deeply depressed, and financially ruined, Loeb checked into a New York City hotel and committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills.

And it was in this kind of environment that Arthur Miller was also targeted by HUAC, as were his friends and colleagues. So he responded by giving us one of the most enduring reactions to this politically-charged era: his play The Crucible., which opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in 1953. He transported audiences enveloped in the Red Scare back to 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts and that hysteria caused by the witch trials, where accusations of disloyalty and subversion also destroyed lives and careers.

Miller with Dick Cavett: “I had signed my name to anything that came in the mail that was protesting the Cold War, the rising McCarthy thing … And I had been to meetings of communist writers in the past in the 40s. And a lot of my friends were on the left and I was too. But fundamentally, I think what really got them upset was The Crucible.”

BEGINNINGS

When it comes to Broadway partnerships in the 1940s, few were stronger or more successful than that of playwright Arthur Miller and director Elia Kazan. They first met in 1946 and worked together on Miller’s second Broadway play All My Sons, which became a massive, career-defining hit production for both men. In the inaugural ceremony of the Antoinette Perry Awards, Kazan won the Tony for Best Direction, and Miller won for Best Author. Their next production Death of a Salesman was an even bigger success, being awarded the Pulitzer Prize and once again winning Tony Awards for both men as well as Best Play.

Then Miller took a page from history and was inspired by Marion Starkey’s book on the Salem Witch Trials called The Devil in Massachusetts. Kazan and Salesman producer Kermit Bloomgarden were once again brought onboard as Miller sketched out a courtroom drama involving mass hysteria and institutional corruption. He said in an interview that this early draft was his attempt to address the fear-mongering coming from all the Congressional hearings:

“But when the McCarthy thing started, I was simply inarticulate when it came to explaining to people, who were being carried away with this, why it was a horror. I couldn't explain it. Once, I said, ‘Well, what's wrong with what he's doing?’ Well, you try to explain to somebody who's saying that, it gets more and more difficult. But I knew that at the bottom of it all, we were being eroded in our relations with one another.”

Miller and his plays were attacked by groups like the American Legion, which protested the touring company of Death of a Salesman, and there was the Catholic War Veterans, which got his plays banned on Army bases. The pressure even affected a film that he and Kazan had been developing called The Hook, which was about corruption on the Brooklyn docks. Columbia Pictures insisted that the story's corrupt union bosses be rewritten as Communists instead. Miller refused and pulled the script, rather than make any changes.

Then in January 1952, Kazan himself was called in for a private hearing with HUAC. There he admitted to his own past Communist Party membership, but flatly refused to name anyone else. Within days, this “secret” hearing was leaked to the press, and 20th Century Fox reportedly delivered a blunt ultimatum to Kazan: that he should go back to Washington and cooperate fully by naming names, otherwise be blacklisted from working in Hollywood altogether.

Kazan was at the height of his movie career, with his recent adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire earning 12 Oscar nominations that year, including Best Director. And with numerous other projects coming his way, he didn’t want to throw all that away. So in early April, Kazan asked Miller to come to his house, and there he laid out his dilemma as well as his decision to cooperate with HUAC. Though he vehemently disagreed with Kazan’s choice, Miller would later write, “Oddly enough, I was not filling up with hatred or contempt for him; his suffering was too palpable. The whole hateful procedure had brought him to this."

After their conversation, Miller made his way to Salem “for the first time on a dismal spring day” and there in a “gloomy courthouse” he spent days going through the actual transcripts from those trials in 1692. He began to see not just the drama of the hearings themselves, but also the petty vengeance at play and the lives that were affected. The more he “read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences” in the 1950s. And it was while combing through these historical records that the news officially broke that Kazan had testified and named names at his public hearing. Years later, Kazan was asked about his choice to testify:

Interviewer: Well, what did you have to gain by that?

Kazan: Gain? Nothing, it’s just the truth. The only thing I had to gain was the feeling that I was doing the right thing. I didn't have a damn thing to gain about it…

Interviewer: But a lot of people didn't do that, they would have protected people that they'd known.

Kazan: Well, they do what they thought was right. I did what I thought was right…But I don't mind losing friends, if it's in a good cause, and I also gained a lot of friends. A lot of people admired what I did, and said it took courage.

Following that public testimony, Miller begrudgingly but firmly broke off all contact with Kazan and dropped him from the project. As hard as it was to make that decision, though, it did provide a focus for his play. Rather than a generalized look at corruption within the Salem witch trials, Miller now concentrated on the moral choices made by individuals. For example, there were the young girls who chose to accuse others of witchcraft, with no evidence other than their allegations. Then there was the real-life historical figure of John Proctor, who faced an agonizing dilemma of whether to sign a false confession to save his life, or refuse to "name names" and die with his integrity intact. With these minor adjustments, Miller’s narrative was now focused, ready, and in need of a capable director. Although it would take a while before the play actually had a name.

But with Kazan gone, Bloomgarden and Miller had the immediate task of finding a new director. Unfortunately, the political climate had narrowed their choices. They approached several top-tier directors including Harold Clurman and Daniel Mann, but they were either targets of the blacklist themselves or were unwilling to be part of Miller’s not-so-subtle attack on HUAC and McCarthy. So what they needed was a director with an undisputed position on Broadway, who was also completely untouchable by the blacklist. They settled on Jed Harris, who was in the midst of trying to resuscitate his once spectacular career.

A NEW DIRECTION

Now, you’ll remember his name from our discussion earlier this season of The Lake, a short-lived and highly contentious production starring Katherine Hepburn. As I pointed out then, through the years, Harris had developed a notorious reputation for cruelty and hostility, and there was a long list of Broadway artists who wanted nothing to do with the man. Famed actor Laurence Olivier said he was “the most loathsome man I ever met.“ Director Harold Clurman said he was full of venom. The playwright George S. Kaufman once joked that when he died, he wanted to be cremated just so his ashes could be thrown in Harris’ face. And then there was scenic and costume designer Tony Walton, who describes Harris this way:

“So this is in the middle 50s. I was able to see it first hand, that astounding behavior, which could be adoring and loving and adorable and lovable at one moment and then nightmarish and surreal at the next … It was already kind of taken for granted that you could get successful if you behaved like that.”

So Harris certainly had his failings and his enemies, and yet over the course of three decades he became one of Broadway’s most successful and influential producers with plays like The Royal Family and The Front Page. He transformed the role of a Broadway producer from a mere financier into an active artistic collaborator and manager. In 1928, Time magazine noted that Harris “edits and attends to the details of producing plays with a strange, irritable, creative fervor, so that you might think he had written them.” This attention to detail also led him to direct plays, including acclaimed productions like Our Town and The Heiress.

But by 1952, when he and Arthur Miller met, Harris wasn’t quite the powerhouse he used to be, and not surprisingly, fewer people wanted to work with him. Yet he still had this enormous, instinctive force radiating from him. It was an energy that Miller thought he could use to bring out a major theme in his play:

Miller speaking in Salem, Massachusetts: “People get hot enough they'll trample over anything, and what my play is really about, and what I think Salem means or should mean, is that here some people refuse to compromise with the government and tell lies in order to save their lives.”

But almost immediately, as they began working together that summer, Harris was pushing Miller to cut and revise the massive manuscript that he had researched so thoroughly in Salem. Harris wanted to cut through most of the dense legal and political exposition, arguing that the audience needed momentum, not a history lesson. Though the collaboration was stressful, they did hammer out three different drafts that gradually trimmed Miller's sprawling, historical script down into a tighter and more fast-paced drama, that at one point had the title Those Familiar Spirits. But after all this work was done, Harris actually asked to be credited as co-writer and share in the profits. Now, Miller laughed off the proposal at the time, but privately was infuriated by the notion that Harris would claim any rights to his play. Miller even considered firing Harris for such a bold move, but he felt that after all these months of work they were “past the point of no return.” And besides, without Harris there was no director.

REHEARSALS BEGIN

When it came to the cast, several names from Death of a Salesman had been floated to the press, but it was Tony-winner Arthur Kennedy who was ultimately given the role of John Proctor, and he was surrounded by other established actors like EG Marshall, Cloris Leachman, and Beatrice Straight, who was playing the role of Elizabeth Proctor and had been directed by Harris in his previous production of The Heiress. But there were also a bevy of rising stars in the cast as well, including Claudia McNeil, making her Broadway debut, and Madeline Sherwood, who was originally cast as Mercy Lewis.

As rehearsals began in the fall of 1952, Miller had dropped the name Those Familiar Spirits, while his wife had jokingly suggested Death of a Salem as an alternative. But Miller decided to just leave his play untitled when the cast first gathered around a table to read the script. As for Harris, his initial “discussions and character insights were exciting and bold.” But according to Straight, once staging began, Harris’ abrasive style reared its ugly head, and he spent those early days sizing up each of the actors—deciding who he could charm, who he'd have to tolerate, and more importantly who he could push around. Madeline Sherwood had this to say about Harris:

“Rehearsals got a little bit tense…Jed Harris was a very formidable looking person. He was very dark. He had very black eyes and black hair. And he had a kind of a sharp kind of face. He looked like my image of Richard II, not at that time, but later. He really did look sort of that way…”

And Richard II is an interesting comparison, because although he was a deeply flawed and insecure king, he also showed signs of intimidation, tyranny, and unpredictability throughout his reign. Words that could be used to describe Jed Harris as well. During rehearsals, it was Arthur Kennedy who became Harris’ target of choice. Despite his Tony-winning performance in Death of a Salesman, Kennedy was dismissed as lacking class, and Harris reduced the actor to nothing more than his blue-collar roots. Miller tried to defuse this unnecessary criticism by arguing that Proctor was something of a peasant himself. But that didn't stop Harris from continuing to provoke the actor during scene work. And as his moods grew darker throughout the rehearsal process, Harris turned his attention to Cloris Leachman as well, who played Abigail Williams and became another frequent target of his erratic outbursts. And all this was in sharp contrast to Miller, who was typically reserved during rehearsals and also polite to cast members, including the young actors like Sherwood:

“Arthur was around a lot. I’m not sure whether he was there every day…I do I have this memory of him being sort of in the background of being this kind of tall, very spare looking man who didn’t talk very much to the actors…and I think that he had an aura about him that said, ‘I am a person who cares about people.’ And I think this is reflected in his writing.”

Despite their differences, though, Miller did care about Harris. He was especially concerned one day when Harris didn’t show up to rehearsal. Miller did what he could, but after awhile sent the actors to an early lunch, so he could go check on his director. What he found at Harris’ apartment was a man in his bathrobe, bundled up in blankets with his teeth chattering. Miller kept asking Harris what was wrong and suggested he go to the hospital. But Harris just mumbled in a gravelly voice, “Never mind about that. What's wrong with me is my business.”

Unsure of what else to do, Miller returned to the theater and had the actors pick up where they left off. But a short while later, Harris showed up and quietly sat in the back with a wrap around his neck. Within an hour, he was back on his feet and directing again. Of that experience, Miller said, “I think he was afraid that he didn't know what to do with my play. He seemed so uncertain all the time.”

Now, in more than twenty years on Broadway, no one had ever seriously suggested removing Harris from a production. But that’s exactly what Miller and Bloomgarden were considering. Yet when they sat down to discuss that very possibility, Harris was surprisingly calm. Maybe he saw it coming, maybe he even wanted it. Because his response was rather “even-tempered” as he agreed to being replaced—as long as he received his full directing fee and royalties. Bloomgarden actually considered this steep cost if it meant getting rid of Harris. But Miller was hesitant. As difficult as Harris was, publicly dismissing someone of his stature, especially while he was visibly unraveling, just felt almost cruel.

So Harris was allowed to remain, and the rehearsal atmosphere only worsened. Miller later described Harris as “a dangerous child with a bomb in his hand.” Here was a cast filled with talented actors, eager to tackle challenging material, yet their increasingly unstable director only became more volatile, with shouting matches, tantrums, and erratic directing choices. For example, the actors were instructed to deliver entire scenes directly out to the audience, instead of speaking naturally to one another. At other times, Harris would chalk out fixed positions on the stage floor, not letting the cast move beyond them.

While Harris and Miller were at odds when it came to most decisions, there was one surprising choice they did agree on. It was Christmas Eve 1952 when they finally gave the untitled play its name, The Crucible, although they came to their decision for very different reasons. In chemistry, a crucible is a vessel subjected to extreme heat to melt away impurities and test a metal's strength. Harris liked the word partly because he figured most audiences wouldn't know what it meant, and might connect it to the cross or crucifixion. Miller liked “crucible” for its other meaning, referring to a severe, agonizing trial that fundamentally changes a person’s life. And the production itself was about to face its own trial, an out-of-town tryout in Wilmington, Delaware.

OUT-OF-TOWN CHANGES

In mid-January 1953, Harris and Miller boarded a southbound train to the Playhouse Theater in Wilmington and were joined by a NY Times reporter, who sat with them for the two-and-a-half-hour ride. Miller talked about his writing process and then spoke quite candidly about how his play might be received:

“Yes, there may be repercussions on this play. There may be those who will think that it was deliberately written because of the present period through which we are living. But that doesn't matter. Even if there are repercussions, I don't worry. I have had repercussions before. My own attitude is that others have a right to their opinion and I have a right to mine…What good is freedom unless you are willing to use freedom? If a man can't speak his heart, he is robbing his art.”

Harris would respond to Miller at various moments in the conversation and add his own thoughts about the work and even Miller himself. But then he began to openly dissect the play and offer his own assessment of it:

“This play has got flaws. There are going to be people who will have a field day cutting this play to pieces. They will say that it is a monster of a play, that it is overwritten, that Arthur has tried to cover too much ground, that there is enough in it for four plays. They are going to say that there are things here that are wild and mad…I don't care about that. I know that there are flaws. But this play has a certain bigness. I think it has a certain power…The bigness of the solid theatre approach is there in a most extraordinary way.”

Between this play talk, their conversation also drifted to baseball and opera, allowing these two men a chance to talk about other things besides the upcoming tryout. But behind this brief serenity was a production bubbling over with chaos and confusion by the time the cast arrived in Wilmington for the show’s world premiere.

There was one actor who still didn’t know his lines. Miller himself was having to rehearse Straight and Kennedy in their Proctor scenes, even though Kennedy secretly wanted out of the production. Harris was at his wits end with Bloomgarden and actually barred him from theater, telling him, “I am a latter-day Duke of York, the Prince of Wales. You, my dear man, are a mere accountant.” And then, in the midst of all this turmoil, Cloris Leachman had reached her limit and left the show. Sherwood recalls what happened next:

“And there were the three men, Jed Harris, Arthur Miller and Kermit Bloomgarden as they came toward me. I thought, I know what they’re gonna say. I know what they’re going to say. And they did. They sort of surrounded me and they said, “We want you to be Abigail.” And I said, “Good!” And then I was sat down at a table in the hallway, and they put a contract in front of me and a pen and I signed it without reading it, without looking at it. I mean I was so dumb, but I was so excited. I was so excited, you know. And I signed this thing and I went right into the play. I was the understudy and knew the lines, but I went in I think that night or the next night. It was incredible.”

Come opening night in Wilmington, Sherwood may have been excited, but Miller was a nervous wreck and would frequently leave his seat to join his agent in a bar connected to the theater. By the final scene, however, he couldn’t watch anymore as they both waited anxiously for the final curtain to come down. And to their surprise, they heard the audience cheering and applauding. The ovation continued as they called out for the playwright to take a bow. Miller slowly started down the aisle, when all of a sudden Harris “strolled from the wings to centerstage” and took a bow. Miller stopped dead in his tracks as the audience kept cheering, and he and his agent watched in shock as Harris awkwardly took another bow. Harris would later claim it was the actors who pulled him onstage and made him do it.

Now, in total there were only four performances of The Crucible in Wilmington, but it was enough for Harris and Miller to have plenty of notes to go over as rode the train back to New York. With just a week until the show’s opening at the Beck Theatre, Harris was once again pushing Miller to make script changes to streamline the plot and bring a quicker pace to the narrative. Miller reluctantly trimmed several dialogue exchanges in the first and third acts, but the biggest cut was a scene where John Proctor meets Abigail Williams in the woods warning her to stop the witchcraft accusations, giving those two actors at least one less scene to worry about.

OPENING and RE-OPENING

The Crucible had been through a quick but tough process in Wilmington, Delaware, and as the cast went back into rehearsals in New York, Miller said that they were "dried up from the tryout ordeal. They couldn't maintain a level of life” in their characters. But there was no time to catch their breath as they had just a few days to incorporate last-minute changes from Harris and Miller. So that on January 22, 1953, after a year of writing and rewriting, The Crucible finally opened at the Beck Theatre. That same day, there was a NY Times article with the headline “87 Red Leaders Indicted” and it detailed American Communists who had been indicted on charges of conspiracy. So Miller was keenly aware of the atmosphere on opening night, and was not surprised by its cold reception:

“And as a matter of fact, at the night of the opening of that play, I stood in the lobby of the theater as the audience was filing out at the Martin Beck Theatre … And nobody spoke to me … I knew a lot of the people, it was opening night, and I knew those people, because I had just had a tremendous success in Death of a Salesman … and very few people came up and even said anything to me … A few glared at me and showed their teeth."

Some reviewers called the play overly somber and uneven, while others said it was more sermon than drama, more message than heart. One even dismissed the play by going after Miller himself: "The world has made this author important before he has made himself great." As for Brooks Atkinson of the NY Times, while he enjoyed individual performances, he just couldn’t let go of Miller’s previous masterpiece enough to judge Crucible on its own:

“Although The Crucible is a powerful drama, it stands second to Death of a Salesman as a work of art. Mr. Miller had had more trouble with this one, perhaps because he is too conscious of its implications. The literary style is cruder. The early motivation is muffled in the uproar of the opening scene, and the theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of Death of a Salesman. It may be that Mr. Miller has tried to pack too much inside his drama, and that he has permitted himself to be concerned more with the technique of the witch hunt than with its humanity … After the experience of Death of a Salesman we probably expect Mr. Miller to write a masterpiece every time. The Crucible is not of that stature and it lacks that universality.”

Miller would later point the finger squarely at Harris for the play’s mixed reviews, saying “the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director…who insisted that this was a classic, requiring the actors to face front, never each other.” But regardless of its perceived faults, two months after opening, The Crucible won the Tony and Donaldson Awards for Best Play, with Beatrice Straight also taking home the Tony for Best Featured Actress. Then, in a moment of life imitating art, Straight left the production in April due to her pregnancy — not unlike her character Elizabeth Proctor who was spared the gallows for the same reason. Her replacement was Maureen Stapleton, another Tony winner you'll remember from the episode on Orpheus Descending.

In fact, there was quite a game of musical chairs that June as six other roles changed actors. One of the biggest shifts was when Arthur Kennedy left and EG Marshall was moved over into the role of John Proctor, and then in a rare move, the show’s stage manager took over Marshall's previous role as Rev. John Hale. And with ticket sales lagging heading into the summer, this revolving door of actors gave Miller the perfect opportunity to finally address his issues with Harris’ version of the show. So Miller took the unusual step of revisiting and reshaping a show during its run, taking over as director of his own play.

He made some cuts, sharpened emotional moments, and made relationships more immediate. He also altered the blocking and stopped actors from facing out into the audience, and instead let them react naturally with each other. When it came to the stage itself, he stripped it bare of most of the set, leaving black curtains and an open space for actors to play their scenes. But one of the most significant changes was reinserting that cut scene between Proctor and Abigail in the woods in order to give their central conflict more urgency. The Crucible 2.0 began June 22nd, exactly six months after its official opening. The NY Times noted that this revised version was better received, but it did nothing to save the play in the end. Just three weeks later the show closed on July 11, 1953. And even after 197 performances, most audiences still didn’t get the title.

Miller with Dick Cavett: “You could tell they didn't know what the “crucible” meant. The word was meaningless. Most people don't take chemistry seriously, so they didn't know what “crucible” was. So it was a complete blank, excepting we had a photograph of somebody in the Times, I think, with one of those suits on that the Puritans wear, in which there has never been a success, as they say.”

And Miller wasn't exaggerating when it came to plays about Puritans. In fact, just a few weeks before Crucible closed, there was an off-Broadway revival of another witchcraft play set in Puritan New England called The Scarecrow. And as a side note, this cast included a young, virtually unknown actor named James Dean, making his Off-Broadway debut in a small, non-speaking role as a ghost. Unfortunately, for him and the show, it closed after only seven performances. Showing that Puritans were indeed not good box office on the New York stage.

MILLER AND HIS OWN CRUCIBLE

And had the production history of The Crucible stopped there, then this play would likely have become just an interesting footnote in Miller’s career, alongside other lesser-known rarely-produced works like The American Clock and Broken Glass. But fortunately for Miller and his Crucible, the next 5 years would solidify their reputations as well as bring real-life drama to their warnings.

In early 1954, the Belgian National Theatre in Brussels invited Miller to attend the European premiere of his play. But when he applied to renew his passport for the trip, the State Department refused, deeming his presence overseas "not in the national interest." According to one account, when the opening-night audience began calling for the author to take a bow, it was the American ambassador who stood up to accept the applause, highlighting the absent playwright whose own government wouldn't let leave the country. Word got out, and the Belgian press had a field day, criticizing American democracy and McCarthyism in the same breath.

Whatever Washington intended by keeping Miller home, it didn't keep The Crucible from spreading. Because later that same year, there were productions in Bristol, England and Paris, France, before coming back to the US at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in January 1955. Meanwhile, Miller continued to write about the dangers of betrayal and conformity in two new one-act plays, A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays. They closed on Broadway in 1956, the same year that Miller’s secret relationship with famed actress Marilyn Monroe became public, leading him to divorce his first wife of nearly 16 years. Interestingly, it was Elia Kazan who had introduced Miller to Monroe, years earlier, while Kazan was briefly dating her. But at this point, Monroe was an even bigger star and was about to film her newest movie The Prince and the Showgirl, directed by Laurence Olivier and filmed in London. Miller tried to renew his passport to travel with Monroe, which once again brought him to the attention of the State Department and HUAC.

By 1956, the Red Scare was starting to lose steam. McCarthy had been censured by his own colleagues in the Senate, and was no longer leading anti-communist hearings. And similarly at HUAC, their political power was waning and was receiving more public pushback. Yet they still kept the hearings going. As I mentioned earlier, Paul Robeson appeared before the committee in June of 1956, and that same month, Miller was also called. Now he saw the whole thing as a calculated way for HUAC to stay relevant and make some headlines:

“There is nothing a politician won't stoop to if it means some publicity for them or some power. That's the nature of power, and people do whatever they can to achieve power and keep it. They went after me primarily because I was well known, and I would get them a headline in the newspaper, which is exactly what happened. Even at the time I felt a little bit cynical about the whole thing, it was a game that they were playing with me.”

But for HUAC Chairman Francis Walter there was really only one person he wanted to see, and that was Marilyn Monroe. So he reached out to Miller's lawyer, Joe Rauh, and offered him a chance to cancel the whole hearing, if Monroe would simply pose for a photograph with him. Miller flatly refused the offer, choosing instead to protect her career and stand up for his own principles.

So on June 21st, Miller sat before the committee, with Monroe there for support. Walter had privately promised he wouldn't press Miller to name names, but right out of the gate broke that promise by demanding that Miller identify other writers he'd once met at a conference years earlier. Miller, in turn, pushed back, evoking the freedoms guaranteed to all Americans. The committee insisted, though, and began asking about prior sympathies and why a communist organization once staged one of his plays. He replied that he had no more responsibility for who produces his plays than General Motors has for who rides in their Chevrolets.

At every turn, Miller refused to confess wrongdoing, much like John Proctor in The Crucible, and finally replied: "When I say this, I want you to understand that I am not protecting the communists or the communist party. I am trying to, and I will, protect my sense of myself.” The committee was not moved, and convicted Miller of contempt of Congress and slapped on a $500 fine. Miller had also racked up $40,000 in legal fees, even though he couldn’t really use his lawyer:

“Yeah, but you were not allowed to confer with a lawyer. It was right out of Salem, right out of Salem. Joe Rauh was sitting next to me. We could not talk to one another.”

But ultimately, Miller got the last word. First, he married Monroe just four days after the hearing, and got his passport renewed, so he could join her in London. Then, months later, a federal appeals court threw out his conviction, ruling that the HUAC Chairman had misled him from the start.

Back in New York, Jed Harris was still trying to recapture his former glory by working with another renowned playwright, Guy Bolton, who was best known for writing the books for musicals by Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and the Gershwins. But for this production, Harris was bringing Bolton’s complex three-act drama Child of Fortune to the stage. Unfortunately, the play only lasted 23 performances, undone by Harris’ cold, uninspired staging, and became his final Broadway production…well, almost. Harris did attempt a comeback with a young Canadian playwright, who has one of the most perfectly theater names I’ve ever heard, Andrew Angus Dalrymple. (Isn’t that just great?) Now, though his play never actually made it to Broadway, their journey together was captured in a NY Times feature article written by the playwright himself. I’ve included a link to that story in the show notes, and you really should check it out.

So, getting back to Miller and The Crucible. By 1958, Senator McCarthy had passed away and much of the public and political panic had subsided, but Broadway was still a business and was concerned with commercial survival, union protection, and artistic staging. Meanwhile, there was a growing movement away from the Theater District in midtown and into smaller, more visceral stages known as off-Broadway. And in March of that year, a young producer named Paul Libin brought The Crucible to the Martinique Theatre on 32nd Street.

REVIVAL AND LEGACY

In the world of commercial theater, once a major play by a famous writer gets tossed aside by the critics, producers tend to leave it alone for awhile. It becomes radioactive. Expensive. Not worth the risk. Which is what makes this remounting of Miller’s unsuccessful play so remarkable, and such a turning point. Because the Martinique production didn't just restage The Crucible, it reinvented how the play actually worked as a piece of theater. And this was all thanks to the director, Word Baker, whose only NY credit at that time was as a stage manager but would go on to become best known for staging the original production of The Fantasticks. At the Martinique, Baker had basically no budget and a stage that was surrounded on all sides by the audience.

Gone were the massive, gaunt sets from the Beck stage and an audience held at arm's length. Now, the audience would be in the courtroom, close enough to feel every accusation. With the original production’s excesses stripped away, the language and moral stakes of the play could now take center stage. For the first time, John and Elizabeth Proctor stopped feeling like symbols delivering a political argument, and started feeling like a real, grieving couple facing gut-wrenching decisions. Also, the show now had a narrator to introduce various scenes by providing historical background as well as describing the settings. Miller, who had been disappointed in 1953, was immensely satisfied with this new version of his play, even if it wasn’t another big Broadway production.

Arthur Miller: “A small group of young people did it off-Broadway, and it became a big success then, in a much worse production than the original one, but they were passionate, and they really were terrific.”

The critics were also pleased, with Brooks Atkinson praising the performances and admitting that political noise from Washington made it hard to see the play clearly the first time around. But now, with a little distance, The Crucible could finally be judged on its own terms. This 1958 revival ran for almost two years and racked up 633 performances. Miller’s play was now out from under that 1953 shadow and transformed into a cornerstone of the American theater. It has gone on to become one of the most frequently produced plays around the world, including five Broadway revivals, it’s a fixture in school curriculums, and is widely recognized as one of Miller’s greatest works.

“Most of the notices I've had in my life are bad. And I've finally got, thank God, to where … I figured, ‘Well, if it's good, you see, it'll be there in 20 years; if it's not good, then it shouldn't be there in 20 years.' And I've been righter than I've been wrong over the long haul. See, A View from the Bridge was fundamentally dismissed, so was The Crucible really. I don't think a year goes by that A View from the Bridge and The Crucible don't have major productions in Europe, here, Latin America, all over the world.”

What began as a response to a specific moment in American history evolved into a cautionary tale about what happens when fear overrides reason, when institutions meant to protect the truth, distort it instead. But it’s also a story about endurance. Because sometimes the most important works don’t arrive fully formed. Sometimes they have to be tested, reshaped, and rediscovered before their true impact is understood. And in the case of The Crucible, that journey from uncertain beginning to lasting legacy is exactly why it continues to find new audiences and new relevance more than seventy years later.

BONUS SEGMENT

Madeline Sherwood on PBS: “Afterwards, I went to the phone and I telephoned my agent, New York, and I said, Marty. And this man had a lot of big plans for me. He had really big plans that was going to do very well. He was a nice man. He was one of the heads of William Morris at that time, was a very big agent. And he had signed me and I was excited and so on and so forth by that. But I said, I’m Abigail. He said, Oh, that’s great. I’ll be down right away to negotiate. And I said, oh, well, I’ve signed the contract. You said you sign what, what, what, what you get. And I said, Well, I got ten dollars more than I got as the understudy. And he said, oh, no billing. Oh, they didn’t talk about billing, I said. You are a very stupid girl. And he hung up the phone and he dispensed with me as his client.”